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Windows Cluster Edition
eth8686 writes "Microsoft is aiming to have its first cluster version of Windows ready in time for a supercomputing conference this fall." From the article: "The next version of the Compute Cluster edition will extend to Microsoft's .Net programming infrastructure, letting developers write software using the C# programming language, he said."
What is the fundamental difference with the "cluster version" of Windows? OS X clusters just fine and there are no "special editions" other than a few software additions that hardly count as a different OS. And Linux requires very little to get it in a cluster compute configuration.
.Net programming infrastructure, letting developers write software using the C# programming language, he said.
.Net is easier and more secure.
However, Theimer said the cluster version will include some restrictions on how the version can be used to prevent companies from performing standard Web hosting or other functions.
Wow. When you compare this to the standard capability of OS X, it seems like a real rip off. You get reduced functionality. Why?
The first version will reproduce many basic features of Linux clusters, Theimer said.
Then why not use Linux?
The next version of the Compute Cluster edition will extend to Microsoft's
Ah, I see why now. But what impetus is there to use the first version if this is coming in the second version? Kinda like Windows 1.0 I guess.
Although such code runs more slowly than C programs running directly on Windows,
Aauuummm........
writing programs in C# that run atop
Says who? It certainly is/will be easier but more secure is something that has yet to be proven. To date, the track record is not impressive.
Often, Theimer said, it's more important to have a program as soon as possible than to have it running at peak performance, he said.
Ah, the fast food approach to software design. Don't you know that stuff makes you code obese and causes an early demise necessitating frequent checkups?
A third version will include developer improvements to ease programming on clusters. It also will include high-level management tools and will help customers integrate their high-performance computing equipment with the rest of their infrastructure, he said.
This is going to be in the third version of the release? I guess they have been looking at Xgrid, Pooch and other software and it will take them two versions to integrate what others have already got.
Seriously, Microsoft. Please come up with some innovative features and give us something that no other vendor offers or in a package so slick that we cannot help ourselves, but to purchase the Microsoft solution. This is nothing that is not offered elsewhere in the market, but has the appearance of locking us further into a Microsoft paradigm.
You guys have the right idea in that cluster computing is going to be a bigger market than it currently is, but you have to be more hungry and learn again how to ship software that creates desire and meets your customers needs in a timely fashion.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
If you're spending $millions on a cluster, it's more useful to spend the money you'd spend licensing MS software on more computers for your cluster.
cost benefit analysis.
At least, that will be the corporate management perception.
This move could put clustered computing in the mainstream.
Agile Artisans
Let me be the first one to say: Windows isn't
- Designed
- Ment
- Capable
for/of running on a Top500 server.The most important part is the design on those systems. They need flexibility. Windows is anything but flexible. No wonder that the top500 is mostly made up from unix/linux systems.
They need customized things, not a toy. The people running those supercomputers want to customize things themselves. Windows is just not ment for anything else than desktops, thats the truth and i know i'll get flamed for it.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I work in the field (sysadmin for a 800 node cluster), and this is pretty laughable. Microsoft is desperate for the "street cred" of being able to handle high performance computing. Sun, IBM, Dell, HP, Apple all have it. Microsoft doesn't.
If they want so much as the proverbial foot in the door, they must 1) release all (as in *ALL*) of the source code under a GPL or BSD license, 2) make it available for free to all comers, 3) have user's 3rd-party apps (ISE-TCAD, CFDRC, etc) ported, and 4) provide a knowledge base equal to (All Linux + BSD hackers) * Google.
And that only gets their foot in the door.
Serious scientific computing falls into one of two implementations: Either a tried and true "dusty deck" implementation, or a coding to some new fangled architecture. If Microsoft is really peddling C# as a distributed high performance distributed computing environment, they probably won't win the hearts of the dusty deck people. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft ports something like a parallel Fortran. C# may provide access to a lot of system internals and the .NET framework, but scientists will have to spend more time porting their code then they might want.
In theory, since this is most likely based on a .NET framework and will be a variation of either WindowsXP or Windows Server 2003, and development language supported by the .NET CLR would work for parallel distributed computation.
As someone who has run code on a Cray and who has 45K SETI@home units I say that choice in the clustered supercomputer OS market is good.
Yet again, Sir Bill Gates, KBE innovates and leads the software industry ahead into the future. Bravo.
No argument there.
They need customized things, not a toy. The people running those supercomputers want to customize things themselves. Windows is just not ment for anything else than desktops, thats the truth and i know i'll get flamed for it.
Windows is the last operating system I'd associate with 'super computer', in any interpretation of the phrase. It's a good jack-of-all-trades platform, but I can't see running bloated code, particularly using the CLR. Maybe it's a completely different operation system than we see, as in 'only the kernel', without all the plug-and-play, DRM, and annoying as hell code which throws requestors up while your typing (to steal keystrokes and disappear to do The Bob knows what with your inadvertent instruction.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Make the results public if thats possible :)
I'm sure amongst all the sniping and bitching comments in here, some people will actually be interested to see how it pans out.
liqbase
Never thought I'd live to hear a MS representative utter the phrase "we want to be competitive with something like Red Hat."
MS is so screwed.
FTA: "Even Microsoft's Excel can benefit, he said, noting that some businesses have worksheets that can take hours to calculate."
Ah, I knew Microsoft would come up with a new way to force new hardware. Now companies will need a server farm to run Office BWE 2010.
(BWE: BloatWare Edition)
Ruby on Rails Screencast
If you mean 'cheaper' as in 'suckier' then that'd be right.
/dev tree, all sorts of geeky and usefull stuff for clustering.
Prices be damned, when your buying a 'Redhat OS' your buying a service contract and depending on the price level your gain a full year of paid support. Phone support, web support, updates, the whole nine yards.
With Windows 2003 your just buying the license to run the software, and that's it. You get one free phone call, and if you have security issues that's a free bugreport and all that, but if you need serious help then the whole 'windows is still cheaper' pricing sceme completely goes out the window.
If you don't need serious help, then you don't need Redhat and Debian is perfectly great.
Personally I have a 3 machine OpenSSI cluster in my basement I USE AS A DESKTOP OS. I fool around with it, it runs Debian. One OS for 3 machines, distributed root directory and all that.
Took me like 3-4 hours to setup and I am only a lowly linux nerd. Installing Windows XP and getting it updated and secure took me longer then setting up the Debian Cluster.
It does MPI, it does load balancing. It can root failover, network load balancing, binding network interfaces, single
I can handle up to 256 nodes and I can take add and activate a machine with a single command. I can just add any machine with a PXE-enabled nic card and add another node in under 15 seconds.
If I want performance I can use C. If I want ease of use I can use Python and it's clustering modules. Scientists will probably just use fortran like they've always done.
My machine supports all this, and didn't cost me a nickle. (except for the hardware).
Windows may make a decent desktop, and it has nice and realitively easy to use tools for whipping up a fairly substandard network directory system for it's desktop OS, but in all other matters I don't see how it can possibly match Linux for clustering technology.
This is just some crap that Microsoft whipped up for it's anti-google search engine and is using it to try to show that they aren't complete loosers in the high performance computing market and try to discourage people from porting their scientific applications over to Linux to take advantage of the HPC market.
Funny stuff.
I don't know of many high performance computing groups who have actually bought a Linux contract from a major vendor - keep in mind that all this really buys is support; Linux and the distribution itself is obviously free.
Invariably HPC groups have enough highly technical people on staff to roll their own customized Linux setup (i.e. often compiled from source) and have no need for Red Hat or anyone else.
Consider the target market - these aren't your typical "we need vendor support" business people.
Cluster != huge expensive computer engine. With software like clusterKNOPPIX (I was just playing with this today), it's really easy to take all of the computers in a research lab (that are already connected to the internet) and turn them into a load-sharing cluster. This is different from a super-computer, although you can presumably get some of the benefit if you are also running MPI (I haven't tried that locally yet). In case you don't understant the purpose of such a cluster it's so that when I want to launch 100 simulations (say to do a parameter sweep, which is embarrassingly parallel), I can launch them all from my local computer and openMosix will automagically distribute the workload across all computers in our lab.
Personally, I'm glad Windows is getting in the game, just like I'm glad when the US gets competition in the space program. Competition, it's a good thing (tm). :)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
C# is a winner for these kinds of applications: it is far simpler and less error prone than C++,
For a community that still uses Fortran? I don't think that's their biggest concern.
Sun really screwed this up with Java: if they had taken the scientific and numerical communities seriously and added the necessary features to Java, Java could be the undisputed winner in this market.
Standard Java requires IEEE floating point, so Java programs run the same everywhere. A community that used Crays (which were renown for their lousy, but fast, floating point) doesn't want their programs to run everywhere with precise but slow mathematics; they want their programs to run on their hardware with the hardware floating point as fast as possible.
ultimately turned into a bloated web applications platform.
Isn't that what Java is? It sounds like you're asking Java to service an audience completely different from what it was designed for.
C# is a winner for these kinds of applications: it is far simpler and less error prone than C++,
For a community that still uses Fortran? Not my biggest concern.
I don't see either Java or C# offering the raw speed that the scientific community wants. Speed and predictability come first, not portability or security (scientific code never needs to run as root and frequently runs on computers disconnected from the internet.)
You can make a turtle fly at speeds breaking the sound barrier aswell.
Is the turtle designed for that?
Is it capable of that?
Please answer those questions, then replace the turtle with windows and breaking the sound barrier with building a cluster. As someone noted, MS and Dell put together that cluster. The obvious conclusion is that other people aren't out of their minds yet.
Also, i said "No wonder that the top500 is mostly made up from unix/linux systems". The exception makes the rule stronger, is this familiar?
According to this article: "the computer scientists behind the Top 500 list say that 291 of the machines (58 percent) on the list are clustered machines. While the Top 500 list does not specifically identify the operating system platform, it probably breaks down to around 55 percent Linux, 40 percent Unix, and another 5 percent as Windows platforms."
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What kind of things do they want to customize? Disk IO? Memory paging?
Most customization is application customization, not OS customization. And customizing an app is identical to writing an app. And people write apps for Windows all the time. A wide range of apps, doing a wide range of things. So you can't be talking about app customization.
But if you're talking about OS customization, could you at least wait until you see what the MS Compute Cluster implementation includes, before you complain?
For all you know, the whole point of releasing a cluster-specific version of the OS is to include more of this flexibility you insist is so important.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You've got to be kidding me. Please point out a few examples of supercomputer-class compute-intensive jobs that make use of Java or C#. If you think either of these has the performance to compete with Fortran/C for intense numerical computing, I have a few large bridges to sell you.
I followed the link, then downward several levels without seeing any claim this was ever in the top 500. Perhaps I just missed the text. But there were pricing and offers of help, nonetheless, the claims seemed to be circumspect given the performance level of your claim.
Is this my failure, or is your link just FUD too?
You can make a turtle fly at speeds breaking the sound barrier aswell.
Is the turtle designed for that?
Yes.
Is it capable of that?
It's in the Top500 list, isn't it? If it wasn't capable, it wouldn't be doing it. Simple as that.
Please answer those questions
Just did.
So, basically, you implied Windows isn't good enough to run as a Top500 server, someone pointed out that it already does, and now you're defending it by saying, "Even though it is, it's still not good enough?"
This kind of crap really makes the community look immature.
The exception makes the rule stronger, is this familiar?
The phrase is "the exception that proves the rule", but what people like you don't seem to realize is that the phrase is very old and it uses the word prove to mean "test", not "demonstrate" or "show the opposite can't be true".
Why so many people believe that "exceptions prove rules" simply because a phrase (that they don't understand!) says so, when it is obviously counter to all logic or reason, is something I won't understand.
MS donated that cluster and constantly uses it to advertise that WinNT is as good as UNIX/Linux.
Not a very good example.
"C has a really crappy track record of being secure"
C doesn't kill people, sloppy programmers kill people.
C is just a language; it is neither secure nor insecure. It depends on how lazy the programmer using it is. I'm thrilled there's a thing called C# that helps sloppy programmers. Warn me if anybody writes an OS in that bloated pig.
But C by and of itself dosn't mean code is insecure.
Need Mercedes parts ?
While true, an MS operating system license doesn't cover support. So you would be paying up the nose for software, and paying up the nose for support as well.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Running Windows on a supercomputer is about like running Embedded XP on a real embedded device, like an elevator control system. It is neither designed for nor is capable of meeting the needs of these markets.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Am I the only one that read this and think Theimer and MS have no clue what clusters are designed to do? Using a spreadsheet to do lots of number crunching is an application problem. You are using an application in ways that it was not intended. That's far different than an OS performance issue where your application is limited by what the OS can do and need some way to tweak the OS to perform better. How is MS Cluster going to solve this spreadsheet problem? Is that spreadsheet going to run across hundreds of machines? My solution would be not to a use a spreadsheet in the first place. There must be some other more suitable application.
I may be cynical but I see this as another ploy by MS to expand their revenue by bloat. As their software gets more bloated, the average consumer will be forced to use newer and more powerful OS to run it. I'm sure that MS will be tickled in 2010 when you need a 64 way processor just to run BackOffice 2009 so they can charge your company for a license for each of the the 64 processors.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In the same way, Linux was not designed for the deskop. It wasn't even designed to have 3D games or be used by joe sixpack, and we've seen the usability problems that have resulted from KDE and GNOME kludging it to do what it was never designed to do. (And I'm sure you're going to say "Of course Linux kernel 1.0 wasn't designed for that, but Linux 2.6 was!" But Linux, while it was (at least supposed to be) a from-the-ground-up rewrite of UNIX, it still kept enough of the original design to be seriously flawed with respect to the desktop (see any usability test) and games (see how many of the games come for Windows and how many come for Linux). GNOME and KDE added to the capabilities, but never fixed the design.
The exception makes the rule stronger, is this familiar?
No. The exception disproves the rule. This is a common concept in science called "disproof by counterexample".
The fact that there is a top-500 computer running Windows does, however, prove that Windows is capable of running on a top-500 computer. I'm sorry if this doesn't fit into your world-view, but it is an irrefutable fact. Have a nice day.