Slashdot Mirror
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."
I didn't "see it coming", but it's not unexpected. When was the last time you heard "Windows" and "cluster" in a sentence without some vulgarity attached? Meanwhile, Apple's been in the news with its clusters and is catering to the distributed computing with software like Xgrid and Xsan, not forgetting support for distributed compile in Xcode.
Microsoft is behind on this, and they're now playing catch-up. I suspect we'll see a few cluster-related items from them in the next year.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
And does TFA say anything about licensing? I mean, this is Microsoft we're talking about here.
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.
.NET langauges.
C has a really crappy track record of being secure actually. As does C++. Fundamentally, they are just fine. In practice, just about ever buffer overflow exploit around was enabled at least partly because the developers were sloppy and used unchecked buffers. This is not possible in C# or other
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?
Right, and like Apple and the Linux worlds have never rushed anything to get something market?
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.
You contradict yourself. MS is sensing demand for Windows software that can cluster without much modification. Okay, so they are getting a product ready to do that, and working on getting other features that competitors have ramped up for future versions. It's called having a plan. You can't release a product that is on par with 5 or 10 year established competitors at the 1.0 level.
And I imagine you know this! What version of Mac OS X are we at now? 10.3.x? How come 10.3.x wasn't ready when 10.x.x was ready? Huh? Huh? Huh? If Apple can't deliver features people want in a timely manner...
Software is incremental. You can't skip straight to exactly everything everyone wants. You have to go through the iterations, whether you want to or not. That's just the bottom line!
Finally, a last note. You note about locking you into a Microsoft paradigm. The people this is targted to are users of MS software already.
We just got our copy in the mail to test it. We been talking to MS about this for about a month now. We're going to do a comparison of it over clustering Linux boxes. Same hardware for both clusters. See how they perform.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
From the article: Theimer said; "We want to be competitive with something like Red Hat."
That shouldn't be a problem. At these prices Windows 2003 is already cheaper. It's only when you start adding CALs that Microsoft gets more expensive and people won't be buying a lot of CALs for a supercomputing cluster.
C# is a winner for these kinds of applications: it is far simpler and less error prone than C++, yet it offers crucial features for compute-intensive jobs like value classes, multidimensional arrays, efficient genericity, overloading, an efficient and simple native code interface, and some other language improvements.
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. Instead, Sun kept Java proprietary, played politics with it, and ultimately turned into a bloated web applications platform.
Sun has been claiming that they will be coming out with a separate Java-like numerical language, but that will likely be too little too late.
Now, don't get me wrong, there's no chance at all that C# and MS code will run on a clustered super-computer in the next century. On the other hand, there's actually demand for a clustered windows.
You could set up a Beowulf cluster of linux boxes to automate that task. Or, if you feel like doing an infinite regress, set up a cluster of Windows for Clusters boxes to automate the process.
After all, I am strangely colored.
First of all, scientists are no dummies; C# is a much nicer language than Fortran 77 and (with the right class libraries) nicer than Fortran 9x, and it's not a very complicated language, so they'll probably just use it.
Furthermore, a lot of scientific libraries are now written in C and C++, for which there are already compilers with CLR backends.
But there is no need to recompile: unlike Java, C# and the CLR have very fast and easy to use native interfaces, so you can just keep your existing binaries and call them from C#. This is also important for calling things like PVM and MPI.
But, yes, you probably will also see Fortran-to-CLR compilers.
Technically, I think C# is a great language for scientific and cluster computing, unlike, say, Java. Whether you want to use Microsoft-designed languages, APIs, and/or software is another question.
Then use what many in the high performance compupting field do: Fortran. There is at least one advanced C++ development project I know of that has Fortran as its core deep in the bowels of the FFT routines... for efficiency reasons. It's just plain faster.
Plus, how many buffer overflow exploits have you seen recently on Fortran programs? :-)
-- This
If you take a look at the worlds largest supercomputing project, it uses a distributed computing system, and it's for the most part os agnostic, but, the target software has not been compiled for _all_ availble platforms. For reference, check out seti@home. Granted, this project is of a scale that it deserved a customized message architecture, so it's quite unique overall.
Clusters in general are utilized to solve problems in a distributed manner. In the scientific community, MPI is used, and in the web hosting world, clusters are used for load balancing and high availability. The reality is, both of these tasks can be very application specific, and operating system agnostic. In theory, there is no reason a properly written MPI application cannot be deployed on a cluster consisting of half linux, and half windows machines. In reality, such applications tend to rely on artifacts of having identical nodes, and it would be a lot of extra work maintaining a code base such that it can be arbitrarily launched on both platforms. Its far more efficient to tune it up for a single platform, and just use the same platform across the entire cluster.
In the load balancing world, same issues will surface. There is really no reason you cant use a mix of windows and linux based apache systems to back a load balancing cluster. Again, it would be a LOT of extra work managing the mixed configuration, and ultimately, that gets kind of pointless.
Out in the real world, clustering did focus in on linux rather early in the game, because it's open source, hence the folks doing clustering had the option to actually make changes to accomodate thier clusters. There are numerous models to choose from, ranging from a really simple MPI implementation where each machine is virtually independant, and simply passing messages via some high level api, all the way down to the OpenMosix implementation where each machine in the cluster just has the appearance of 'yet another processor' on the overall host. In the former case, applications need to be custom written for the cluster, in the latter case, no modifications are required to applications. Two vastly different architectures, that both fall within the buzzword 'cluster', but are so far removed from each other, there is no similarity other than the fact both use a lot of computers.
A move by microsoft to produce a 'cluster centric' variation of windows actually validates the linux cluster more than anything else can in the marketplace. It demonstrates clearly that the cluster buzzword is gaining enough traction in the management mindset that microsoft needs a presence in that area.
It'll be interesting to see what the final form of the product really is. If it's just a set of gui configurators to manage an MPI system, it's really nothing that couldn't have been done as a third party add-on, and an admission that no third parties were interested in tackling this high end portion of the marketplace on the windows platform.
If the clustering system turns out to be a full process/thread level migration system, akin to the mosix implementation, it'll have a lot of potential, simply because applications do not need to be re-written in order to take advantage of the cluster, assuming ofc, the application already has enough smarts to distribute it's workload amongst multiple processors. the last time I checked (and it's been quite a while), excel is not smart enought to distribute it's calcs amongst multiple processors, something to do with the single threaded nature of serial calculation.
The final proof of technical issues will come over the next few years, and it's going to be an interesting thing to watch. There is going to be a significant amount of support business generated in migrating clusters from one platform to the
...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.)
More than a little off topic, but windows popping up and stealing the current focus whilst you're typing is the most annoying thing ever. This is not limited to Windows - if you are a Gnome developer, and think you have an idea of how to solve this, please let the community know!
ݼ)s$æúßðíÊ'öX'îò5^àûßQç£
I am a physiker (Physicist?) and worked with a lot of mathematiker (mathematics?). Until recently I programmed on big irons & clusters. We all used only one thingas : Fortran. We programmed on cray, On Origin, on cluster. And we (many groups over many countries) used Fortran. Why is that ? 40 Years worth of mathematical libraries. Extremly optimised compiler code, generating machine code as packed as direct assembler code. And a community you can talk to to get code snippet or code solutions hand on. MPI with years over years of experience.
... And forcing another language... Only a manager would buy such a system for scientifics, and the scientific would snicker while formating all HD and install an OS where High performant Fortran does exists.
Fat chance in hell any of us use anything *BUT* fortran. Why should we care for new language which do NOT BRING ANYTHING to us and force us to port many many libraries, debug again what is mostly now bug free, and start over ? Man. Get a clue. And Make a MS-FOrtran for that cluster and MAYBE if for the same price we get better performance you might get a chance. But for worst performance and same price
As for security... What security ? By the time your are on the cluster you should already have been thru with security, through a front end. The Cluster is to be used for high performance calculation NOT for securly checking bounds of arrays.
Frankly I think this offer is only directed towward marketing/enterprise which use their cluster for ANYTHING but mathematics.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Most pop-up windows aren't *urgent* (like need attention RIGHT NOW), but are more informational.
The ones that do require attention right now aren't going to get it if you look up from the keyboard just in time to see that you hitting space inbetween words has dismissed it...
No application should be able to steal focus from another; nothing is that important on a desktop machine.
No dialogue box should be dismissable in a single, commonly-used key press; it's too easy to do it by accident ("Shit, what did I just agree to?!")
It's official. Most of you are morons.