Microsoft Competes In Supercomputer Market

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."

Comments

If you want easy of use pick *ANYTHING* but Apple

[J. Chrysostom]

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).