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

And for us mere mortals...

[Bananatree3]

"but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively"

and what about the site licence needed for this baby, huh? For us mere basement-cluster builders, there is a cheaper, open source alternative: The OSCAR Project ( Open Source Cluster Application Resources). Yes, it runs on Linux, but it is a nearly step-by-step system of setting up HPC-level clusters. It is being used on many 100+ CPU High Performance Clusters around the world, and it is free without those pesky site licences.

Too expensive?

[onlysolution]

"...but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively..." According to their licensing model EVERY machine costs 469 dollars... Meaning a 20 machine cluster would have a 10,000 dollar overhead just on the OS alone. Not to mention the fact that you'd be compelled to buy it again as Longhorn Cluster Ed. in just a couple of years... It seems like a little work setting up a free OS cluster would be a vastly preferable option, is there really any need or reason for this (at this cost anyway)?

Re:Too expensive my arse

[geoff lane]

You can build an HPC from random PCs but it will be crap because the PC to PC interconnects will be too slow. Real HPC needs highspeed, low latency internal interconnects and these are expensive. But I fail to see how paying a "Windows" tax will make matters cheaper, or easier.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[kylegordon]

You can still have real HPC with slow interconnects. It all depends on the application for the HPC. If your data has a high scatter rate that requires large amounts of data transfer all the time, then you need fast interconnects. On the other hand, if your data can be sent off to a node to be crunched on for 2 hours, then a bog standard gigabit ethernet interconnect will do you just fine.

High-Performance Linux

[jd]

If OpenMOSIX is compiled into the kernel, the total effort required to set up a Linux cluster is virtually nil - you need to tell it what nodes there are in the cluster and it transparently takes care of the rest. A home user with ZERO programming experience but has two or more computers, a hub and a working knowledge of what an IP address is can configure a rudimentary cluster in under five minutes. It may not be optimal, it'll rely totally on OpenMOSIX to do the process migration, and without any apps that can take advantage of it, it would be a little pointless, but it could be done. It requires no expert knowledge or significant intelligence. If you can operate VI, you can operate a cluster at that level.

Difficulty, therefore, is NOT a significant factor in all of this. Ok, what about expense? Well, you're right that Linux is free. So is OpenMOSIX, OpenMPI (and many other MPI implementations), PVM (another messaging library), Lustre (a very high-performance network file system), many scientific and mathematical applications for clusters, etc. There are clustering patches for PoVRay, and it's always possible to write a script to have multiple machines render parts of images anyway. I'm sure there are other applications out there that I'm not thinking of right now, and it's only a matter of time before more "mundane" applications can take advantage of clustered environments. They already do, on Plan 9, to some degree. Oh, Plan 9 is also free.

Cost would appear not to be a major problem either, then. Optimizing is the only thing that is in any way difficult, and a GUI system that doesn't let you get to the really fine detail won't help there. More time, effort and money is spent on optimizing than on anything else, and I simply can't see any possible way that an OS that is designed for ease-of-use by hiding the intricacies can in any way help in that.