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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."

4 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."

  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. 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).