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Microsoft Competes In Supercomputer Market

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the super-vista-gets-a-cape dept.

HoboMaster writes "Microsoft is releasing a public beta of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 in their first attempt to compete in the supercomputer OS market. Gates is planned to speak at the 2005 Supercomputer Conference, which will be Microsoft's first appearance at the conference. Gates, as always, has high hopes for this new version of Windows, even claiming it to be as powerful and easier to use than Linux."

6 of 464 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wake up, Bill by ma_luen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually the importance of the raw performance of the machine is on the decline. More emphasis is being placed on the idea that super computers are only useful in the sense that they help researchers solve problems. So there is growing interest in the notion of "time to solution" as a combination of ease of programming for, ease of using, and of course running a data set on the machine.

    Mark

  2. NY Times Article (free reg. required) by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The NY Times has this article. The opening paragraphs were a bit more intriguing:

    "In January a group of Microsoft researchers set out to discover how much computing power they could buy for less than $4,000 at a standard online retailer. They found the answer at NewEgg.com, where they were able to purchase - for just $3,632 - 9.5 gigaflops of computing speed. That is the amount of computing power offered by a Cray Y-MP supercomputer in 1991 at a cost of $40 million."

    1. Re:NY Times Article (free reg. required) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, its called an Apple G5 Xserve! (5GF rmax/CPU x 2 ~= 10GF for the $3000 cluster node) I'm sure the 970MP will make it into these at some point and that gets us 20GF/box (4 cores) Last time I checked you needed about 1000 of these boxes to get "noticed" on the Top 500 (see entry number 15 and 20.) If you can afford IBM Power5 boxes maybe you can take number 3.

      Somehow I think Windows Compute Cluster(fsck) Server 2003 does not run on the above hardware. Quick, there was just a November Top 500 list article posted yesterday...who was in the number 1 and 2 spot? Oh yeah, IBM BlueGene/L with 131072 custom PowerPC CPUs and a total rmax of like 280TF. Wow, that's only 30,000 *times* the CPU power of the MS $3500 off the shelf supercomputer. True, a 9GF Cray Y-MP may have cost $40mil 15 years ago. Today for $100mil you get 30,000 times the CPU power from BlueGene/L and can claim no 1.

      Can you imagine trying to put 15,000 "beige boxes" (I assume dual proc) purchased from NewEgg.com into a single room and have any kind of reliability? You think there might be a reason the "big" commodity CPU clusters top out at around 4000 boxes? (And that the hardware was not purchased from NewEgg.com...I mean WTF?)

  3. Re:How much? by schon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "ease of use" isn't exactly going to be a big selling point for the guys putting these kinds of computers together

    Excuse me while I find my tinfoil hat.... .. OK, that's better:

    What if MS is doing this so that it can strongarm universities and research institutions? Something like going to the bean counters and saying "hey, we have this great new OS for supercomputers - we'll give you a reduced rate on it, *AND* a reduced rate on the licenses for the rest of your desktops, if you just agree to kick that smelly, communistic, viral, legally-dubious Linux off your clusters! (Did we mention that if you're using Linux, you might have to give up all your precioussss IP?)"

  4. Re:It's no surprise... by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Look, it's one thing to support small clusters. That's a reasonably profitable market place, and I can't imagine a modern OS that is marketed as a server solution not offering that feature. But what we're talking about here is supercomputer clusters, beasties used in nuclear weapons research, weather forecasting and other forms of computational-intensive work. This isn't exactly a huge market. In fact it's a downright small one, dominated by custom applications and by a few companies with a lot of years of expertise in high end computing. This seems more an example of the sort of megalomonia that runs in the bloodstream at Redmond. "Yeah, we gotta have a presence in the supercomputer market! How come no one's modelling black holes or doing long-range climatological forecasting on Windows 2003?" What do they think, that supercomputers are going to be running Exchange 2003? "Oh yeah, baby, look at how fast Excel comes up now!" I'm used to the idea that Microsoft is going to try to dominate huge sectors of the computer industry, but supercomputers? It's as if Gates and his toadies are losing their collective marbles.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  5. If you want easy of use pick *ANYTHING* but Apple by J.+Chrysostom · · Score: 5, Interesting
    We've got a VA Tech-style Apple cluster over the course of the last year here at our university, and let me tell you, that thing had serious problem. It works now, but it took over a year of fighting Apple's stupidity to make the thing function decently. And we're one of the first people to get an Apple cluster up and running for serious computation (unlike VA Tech who have been building it, running the LINPACK benchmark and taking it apart time and time again). Examples of Apple's stupidity:
    • Apple's NFS server only supports 64 simultaneous connection.
    • Apple attempts to explain that "real" supercomputers don't have networked file systems.
    • Disk I/O was slow as molasses. Apple suggests using the AppleTalk protocol to communicate to the file server to speed things up.
    • Disk I/O still slow as molasses. Grad student discovers the software defaulted to non-buffered disk output (flush to disk).