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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."
so its super blue screen(s) of death
Normal is Boring!! http://www.dealwithdeals.com/
"easier to use than Linux"
Yes? Where is the part about the high hopes for this operating system?
... well for me, it was clusterfuck.
Supercomputers aren't about "Ease of use." They're about speed per dollar. When WCC can beat Linux on price/performance, then people will stand up and take notice. Not before.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I don't know what the "easy to use" argument precisely means in this arena. The people assembling and managing large clusters to produce supercomputers are in a significantly different league than your average MS-Word user. Not to poo-poo MS or anything, but Gates seems to have forgotten the audience in this case.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When I worked at Microsoft, I specifically argued *against* getting involved in HPC markets. It isn't really an interesting market. It isn't a big market. And it never will be. If anything it will get smaller rather than bigger. Yes, there are some applications that are not going away but these are not common. After all how many customers does Cray have? How many customers does Microsoft have? Ok, you have the answer to my question. Heck, the ISP and web presence provider markets are more important to Microsoft strategically than HPC.
Indeed I cannot think of *any* reason why one would want Windows on an HPC cluster. Indeed, with Microsoft's reliance on COM and IPC stuff, I would be highly skeptical of using the Windows development environment in these cases. Yes, async I/O might be more mature on Windows, but I think that on the whole, Linux is a better choice.
As for the ease of use factor. This is a product that is really only needed by a few highly technical people. Ease of use for beginners is not important here. Ease of use by experienced UNIX admins is. Sadly Windows fails here pretty badly. After all not everyone needs to build a Beowulf cluster with licensed Windows software in their basement and the intensive number crunching apps that such clusters are used for are the exception rather than the rule.
Finally.....
Why not take Windows Server 2003 Standard or even XP Pro (for fewer than 10 nodes), install SFU 3.5 and PVM and build your cluster that way? It seems that this would be better for the market than this new product which seems to be the worst of both worlds.
This is just about saying "Anything Linux can do Windows can do better" rather than pursuing any reasonable business plan.
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