Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Released

grammar fascist writes "According to an Information Week article, on Friday Microsoft released Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003." From the article: "The software is Microsoft's first to run parallel HPC applications aimed at users working on complex computations... 'High-performance computing technology holds great potential for expanding opportunities... but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively,' said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of [Microsoft's] Server and Tools Business unit, in a statement."

Comments

Ok, I'll be the first

[Weaselmancer]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.

Re:Ok, I'll be the first

[Ethan Allison]

But will it run Linux? (tm)

Re:Ok, I'll be the first

[nephridium]

I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of CPUs cryed out in terror and suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible (but predictable) must have happened.

And in other news...

[nurhussein]

...the HPC community of scientists and engineers continue to not care.

The same folks who operate nuclear accelerators probably don't have that much of a problem operating computers that they need Clippy and pretty colours to help them out "in case they get confused".

Re:Too expensive my arse

[zcat_NZ]

When I first saw this on google news the headline was something about Windows for Supercomputers..

My first thought was "Oh, they've finally announced the real hardware requirements to run Vista"

Cautiously optimistic

[hpcanswers]

I think Microsoft's reason for pushing into HPC is to provide better software development tools for clusters. Can you imagine being able to program in VB.net instead of C99? After all, physicists are there to do science, not write code. Plus, MATLAB (Distributed Computing Toolbox) and Mathematica (gridMathematica) will both be available for Windows CCS, and I imagine Star-P may be out before too long. All in all, I'm cautiously optimistic about getting better development environments available for supercomputing. Of course there is still the concern about license costs and the resource-hogging GUI.

I blogged about these topics a while back, both MS in HPC and better programming tools for supercomputing:

http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticl e&articleId=27&blogId=1
http://hpcanswers.com/plog/index.php?op=ViewArticl e&articleId=25&blogId=1

Re:Absurdity can be profitable"

[Anonymous Coward]

A whole lot of nothing. 100% uptime (so far) and a whole lot of crickets.

Wait till you connect it to the net...

Dooom

[MrPsycho]

Ahh I am haunted by the vision of thousands of BSODs running in perfect parallel.

DUPE!

[x2A]

MS actually /did/ release it 3 years ago, but you know how slashdot is for posting old/dupe stories ;-)