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.

Too expensive my arse

[Umbral Blot]

Hasn't running "parallel HPC applications aimed at users working on complex computations" traditionally been done under Unix, and Linux as well. Seeing how Linux is free it's hard to see how "it has been too expensive", or "too difficult" (since unlike your home user the people running these systems are rocket scientists, I am sure a little command line use doesn't stump them).

Re:Too expensive my arse

[supun]

Your response is the same as mine.

When I worked a Motorola, and was part of their LUG, one of the members was talking about a Beowulf cluster they made. Like bad management, they ordered a bunch of desktop PC they couldn't use, and no one authorized their return. So they sat around in unopened boxes until his team decided to make a Beowulf cluster so they could model the electron flow around traces in an 8 layer circuit board before they had them actually pressed.

Each prototype board cost around $10,000 to create. And after that you have to test to make sure the electron field, around a trace, does not affect another trace. Manually it took a long time and is prone to errors. So if there is a problem, it's another $10,000, and another, until you get it correct.

With this Beowulf cluster they could model the electron flow around a trace and then only make one prototype, saving a ton of money and time. And this was all done with an ISO off the net and a bunch of forgotten computers.

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

[0racle]

Not to many are using Fedora or Slackware on some white box with parts from Best Buy to do HPC. They have been altered to specifically run on hardware that was made specifically for this, and even then management of it is not exactly simple. Not that I believe that 2003 Server will suddenly change that but just using Linux somewhere does not automatically make it the cheapest way.

And I believe the correct answer to your question is Traditionally it has been done by tuned versions of commercial Unices which added to the base cost of the OS over and above the very expensive custom built hardware. Recently Linux has become able to do many of these tasks by similarly being modified at a significant cost running on the same expensive custom hardware. The recent HPC installation using mostly off the shelf parts (they didn't use Ethernet) was the one at Virginia Tech and that ran OS X, not Linux.

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.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[joib]

Not to many are using Fedora or Slackware on some white box with parts from Best Buy to do HPC. They have been altered to specifically run on hardware that was made specifically for this, and even then management of it is not exactly simple. Not that I believe that 2003 Server will suddenly change that but just using Linux somewhere does not automatically make it the cheapest way.


The "standard" cluster these days is standard rack servers from a reputable vendor, along with a Linux distro tailor-made for cluster usage such as Rocks or OSCAR. Typically the only nonstandard hw, if any, is a high-speed network (Infiniband, Quadrics etc.).


And I believe the correct answer to your question is Traditionally it has been done by tuned versions of commercial Unices which added to the base cost of the OS over and above the very expensive custom built hardware.


Perhaps in the mid-1990'ies yes..


Recently Linux has become able to do many of these tasks by similarly being modified at a significant cost running on the same expensive custom hardware.


No. With the exception of the high-speed network card I mentioned above, the rest of the hw and sw are bog-standard. Of course there are exceptions, e.g. SGI, Cray, NEC, IBM etc. but then we're talking "real supercomputers" and not commodity clusters (the market MS is aiming at).


The recent HPC installation using mostly off the shelf parts (they didn't use Ethernet) was the one at Virginia Tech and that ran OS X, not Linux.


Not to piss on OSX, but Mac clusters are probably outnumbered 100:1 by Linux clusters.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[joib]

As I understand it this sort of thing can be done on just about any kind of computer. And at every university I've ever been to there's usually stacks of old pcs laying around.


As opposed to running email and word, HPC is one of these things where CPU power actually matters. Those 500 MHz PC:s aren't worth the hassle to set up and maintain. Not to mention that heterogeneous hardware (which a random bunch of discarded PC:s probably is) is a nightmare to maintain and program efficiently in parallel.

Most clusters consist of quality rack servers from a reputable vendor. TCO matters, not the cost of the hw alone.

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"

Re:Too expensive my arse

[BoneFlower]

Sure, it can be.

In addition to the issues with interconnects, raw performance of individual nodes, and heterogeneous clusters...

Reliability becomes a big deal with such old computers. Sure, a well designed cluster will be able to route around a significant number of failed nodes, but computing efficiency will plummet and won't be terribly predictable(often, predictability becomes more important than raw burst performance). You might have 20 nodes working today, 12 tommorow, back up to 20 for a few weeks, then lose 6, 2 of which are completely dead leaving you with 18 after the repair... You see the problem here?

That said, such things can make for interesting projects, and might make decent production systems in some contexts. They are not, however, a panacea to a universities HPC needs.

Speaking of learnign experiment HPC systems, does anyone know if any of the virtual machine solutions available for PCs can be used to create a software simulation of an HPC cluster? I realize such a thing would be near useless for real work, but might make for an interesting learning exercise and useful testbed before you deploy to the live cluster.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[Weh]

Most researchers have limited funding

University researchers may have limited funding but a lot of researchers at large corps (oil/med/etc) don't have much trouble getting funds for their research, bear in mind also that not everything is research, for instance engineers may simply want to run some large numerical models etc. I have personally seen parallel processing on windows clusters implemented at a large corp, plenty of funding there.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[dbIII]

Real HPC needs highspeed, low latency internal interconnects and these are expensive.

It really depends on what you are doing with it. If the jobs can run in parallel well then gigabit networking is plenty. I'm looking after a couple of clusters used to interpret seismic data, and in some cases each node only reports back when you want it to do a daily checkpoint of where it is up to in a job.

Microsoft haven't even noticed clusters until now, so it will be a few years before anything of note is written to run on clusters on that platform - plus the whole poorly documented moving target operating systems which makes it pointless to port some software that has developed over decades and is run on clusters today.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[multimediavt]

Ummm...I know of several clusters on our campus (VT) that are made of white boxes running Fedora, Gentoo, or Suse. One is a 200 node (400 CPU) Opteron cluster with a Myrinet interconnect named Anantham, and built by Dr. Varadarajan's graduate students. There are other smaller clusters ( 16 - 32 nodes ) of various design that are running on GigE. All of them built of white boxes and other off-the-shelf components ordered from mail-order companies. In the case of Anantham, all parts were ordered separately, i.e., RAM, motherboards, processors, cases, etc., and the system integration was done onsite. So, when you say, "Not to [sic] many are using Fedora or Slackware on some white box with parts from Best Buy to do HPC," I'm guessing you are referring to those in the TOP500 List? If so, yes, there aren't many that submit to the TOP500 List (from large sites) that are using a non-commercial version of Linux, i.e., RHEL. Many of the larger sites are going through first tier vendors (Dell, HP, IBM) for a turnkey cluster solution, but they are paying a premium for those systems for the sake of time to production. They could just as well buy white boxes, but they would be spending a great deal of their own time weeding out problem nodes and components that could be better spent on doing science and supporting users. Academia can afford to take the time to do this, DOE labs cannot, although, that paradigm is quickly shifting as academic budgets tighten and competition in the Computational Science and Engineering arenas heats up among research institutions.

Clusters (the topic of this original post) are not "traditionally [...] done by tuned versions of commercial Unices [sic]". Clusters are traditionally built with off-the-shelf components with Linux and specialized APIs and drivers for the interconnect being used. If you want to talk about HPC BEFORE 1998, then you are looking at large monolithic systems of a custom built nature.

System X does have a GigE network, but it is primarily used for management and job startup within the cluster. We have had a few users with specific MPICH2 needs that have used the GigE network for message passing, but the GigE network was not designed for that task. Our primary communication fabric is IB. We are currently running Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the system, but are evaluating alternatives.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[Antique Geekmeister]

There are exceptions: some folks do wind up digging up racks of old servers, at rock bottom prices or even for free, as their data centers or deployed installations decommission them. You can inherit quite a lot of slightly outdated hardware this way: if you can justify the electrical expense of running them, they're quite convenient for massive, lengthy computing jobs.

A lot of cluster managers also mistake "really expensive, physically robust servers for "will always be working". The complexities of such setups and the general frequency of failure of "high availability" software itself means that the much vaunted 99.99% uptime of such systems is usually based on serious cooking of the numbers, not any metric actually used in the field. After the crops of failures of things like the old IBM deskstar drives, the run of bad tantalum capacitors in Dell motherboards, and other failures that strike entire classes of brand new hardware, it's often better to use older, cheaper, burned in hardware that's had the BIOS updates and the kinks worked out, and save the extra money for the next round of upgrades in six months or a year.

Re:Too expensive my arse

[corvair2k1]

That's a pretty simplistic definition of a grid. A grid is typically a pool of resources that is not under a single administrative domain, which is transparently accessible as a utility. Resources on the grid can be clusters, file systems, single machines, etc. I think you're thinking that this would be a distributed application, where everything is under a single administrative domain.

A cluster is going to be managed as a single machine, true. But you're not necessarily even requiring communication to occur at all for different processes of a job on a cluster. You're basically saying that if you put embarrassingly parallel jobs on the cluster, it's not a cluster anymore.

The term cluster is seen more as an administrative characteristic than on what actual hardware is going into it. As long as you've got everything in one administrative domain, the computers are able to communicate with each other, and these computers are solely dedicated to doing jobs as given by the job scheduler, it's a cluster. Bonus points if there's a fast interconnect. However, there's nothing stopping anyone from submitting N single-process jobs to the N-node cluster, or an embarrassingly parallel job that only communicates at the beginning and end.

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.

Re:And for us mere mortals...

[Demetril]

Considering I work at one of the companies listed in the article MS is working with, and all our HPC clustering is working with linux, and will be for the coming future, I think this is primarily just a PR attempt. I don't even think we're remotely considered running anything on windows for our tasks.

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".

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)?

2003=2006?

[John_Booty]

It takes some serious marketing balls (and/or or a lack of marketing brains) to release a product branded "2003" when we're already halfway through 2006.

I actually have to applaud the naming move; it accurately lets everybody know that this product is based on Windows Server 2003. It would have been quite misleading if they'd passed it off as " Windows Compute Cluster Server 2006".

Wonder what the meetings between the marketing team and the engineering team were like for this one. :)

Absurdity can be profitable"

[asky]

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

I know many people take exception to that remark. But not everyone knows how to build Beowulf clusters.Some of us thought it was insane when, in the 90s, Microsoft said they were going to enter the server market. Yet here they are. And who in their right minds would run their web services out of IIS? (Then again, Apache now runs on Windows.)

The point is, just because the idea is absurd doesn't mean it won't happen. If corporate consolidations put support for technical computing under the IT department, and support for Linux is considered toodifficult for the IT folks, it's only a matter of time before the decree to port technical computing applications to Windows.

The fact is, M$ has access to software vendors, hardware vendors, and large customers in ways that Linux companies do not. They can create markets where they shouldn't be justified (unless you think all operating systems really require anti-virus software).

I'd love to be wrong about this. But I've finally come to the conclusion that sound technical judgement does not stop absurdity from happening.

Re:Absurdity can be profitable"

[pwhysall]

Only sort of.

The front end web servers are IIS. The business logic is all Java, Solaris and Oracle.

Another choice: Rocks Clusters

[joib]

Another, perhaps even more popular Linux cluster distro is Rocks Clusters.

While I don't have personal experience with OSCAR, Rocks is really good. These days, doing a cluster with a "normal" distro is insane. I think MS will have to think long and hard before they come up with something equally easy to install and manage as Rocks.

That being said, I think MS is not targeting Win CCS at academic supercomputing, which has a long history of using Unix/Linux, but rather they want to expand HPC to business customers who otherwise have a 100 % MS environment.

Missing the point a bit?

[nixascyborg]

The idea behind Windows clusters being 'cheaper' has nothing to do with the individual price of the OS (versus, for instance, free Linux); the named price is low, not free, but that is not the point of your savings with a Windows HPC cluster. The point is that most programmers work on a Windows platform and have experience with it. And if you program with/for Windows and, for instance VS 2005, MS counts on the effort of building programs that run on HPC to be considerably less effort than it is on a Linux (or Xgrid) cluster. Making existing Windows 'hits' clusterable (i heard mention somewhere of image, movie and 3d processing software) is easier because of this too; making it work on other clusters is a pain because there you would have to work in an environment you are not used too. Like all things with MS; they count on the familiarity and ease of use to make this all run. That is what makes it cheaper; you cannot get a Linux HPC programmer and if you find him/her he will be godawful expensive; for WinHPC it will just be 'another VS programmer' of which there are a lot. Look for MS to add testing, debugging and development aids for HPC in the upcoming versions of VS.

Re:Missing the point a bit?

[killjoe]

you have presented the MS argument masterfully. Are you a professional PR person? Do you work for a PR or ad agency? I suspect you do.

Anyway your points are not really that relevent because they are not that true. HPC applications tend to be very complex. They are not the types of applications you are likely to trust to a bunch of VS monkeys who draw GUIs with bound controls and call it an application. As for administration there is a mountain of evidence that Nix administration is cheaper then MS administration. Studies have shown that the average linux admin administers significantly more amchines then your average windows admin. They may cost more but they admin more servers. Studies have also shown that windows shops tend to have more servers per user then unix shops and that unix servers tend to run more applications per server.

Ask anybody who has done both and they will tell you. It's much easier to maintain a mass of unix servers then a mass of windows servers. Have ever tried to back up a bunch of windows server? Try doing it without spending ten thousand dollars.

Re:Missing the point a bit?

[nixascyborg]

:)
I am just saying what MS uses to sell this (and their other) product(s). If it is true or not is simply not relevant; their way of getting market works like this and it works well, because a lot of people are ignorant to what they buy. Even if the costs is $millions; we see it happening every day in a significantly large company.
I don't work in PR; I am a programmer working mostly on with Java, Ruby and PHP. My background is C and in university I did program a Unix HPC environment (based on Solaris at that time); we had to implement several algorithms in C to run on that cluster. It was difficult, that is exactly why I think the MS arguments will actually work with managers.

Re:The First???

[Anonymous Coward]

I did manage to flummox the professor with the following question (I'm being serious here!):

Why does a 256 or 512-node computational cluster need a copy of Windows Media Player on each machine?

It was then that I realized that MS's approach to operating systems targeted to different applications is not to strip anything out, but to add layer upon layer of extra functionality to their basic "home computing" OS.

Yes, friends, their Windows 2000 computational cluster software does indeed ship with Media Player.

I can't speak of SQL Server or other variants: does anyone have a clue?

Re:What the?

[TheNetAvenger]

Not that I disagree with you on this topic, but your post is almost word for word what the industry said of Microsoft when it entered the Server market competing against Novell.

Microsoft was considered to be the 'me to servers' of the time, yet as it turns out the MS servers 'did' offer features that the Novell servers of the time didn't and application servers progressed to the point that MS kicked Novell's butt.

The push for application servers also opened the door for *nixes to enter back into the mainstream 'server' environments, as Novell was a pretty closed Server technology and applications running on the Novell server were a joke.

So if history repeats, don't be surprisd if MS does have an ace up its sleeve and its approach to the clustered server model using that ace and companies do find real advantages when using the Microsoft concepts.

However, even if MS does have an Ace, it would be kind of nice to see the technology envelope challenged, and see this back progression into other OSes and *nixes.

I guess it is the same old story, never underestimate MS...

Re:Absurdity can be profitable

[mikeb]

"But I've finally come to the conclusion that sound technical judgement does not stop absurdity from happening"

Something that the majority of Slashdot readers seem not to understand (and with justification) is that purchasing decisions are not rational.

A basic training course on sales techniques will, unless it's totally bogus, emphasise the fact that purchasing is based on emotion, not rationality. Some 80-90% of all sales are emotion-driven and then sometimes post-facto justified by selectively picking facts.

As the world becomes a more complex place and huge amounts of information become available to prospective purchasers there's a kind of paradox emerging that will horrify economists who cling to the theory that perfect markets are based on rational purchasers with perfect information, because the reverse is happening.

Most purchasers are not analytic personalities. People who hang around Slashdot underestimate how much they have (in general) honed their own analytic skills with years of practice while most middle-tier managers in corporates never did. For those non-analytic people, being asked to rationally evaluate a mass of facts and statistics is a SCARY proposition. That's not how they got their job, they did that by looking good in a suit and licking backsides more or less assiduously whilst being ok at judging how the politics are shaping up. Their skillset is way different from yours and they react differently.

The more information you make available to those people, the less they are likely to use and the more they will look around for 'safe' decisions. This will be especially true if their promotion prospects may depend on the outcome. THEY ARE NOT SPENDING THEIR OWN MONEY, it's the company's. Their decision will be based on the likelihood of retaining their job or getting promoted before their mistakes are discovered.

So, figure for yourself. On the one hand some technical guy they distrust because he's smart can 'download an ISO from the interweb and build a cluster myself' or 'buy from Microsoft'.

The first bit of irrational figuring will be 'the Microsoft stuff costs tens of thousands but the geek says it's free - that does not compute, he must be wrong'. The second will be 'if it goes wrong who will get the blame'. Guess the outcome of that one for yourself.

The result is fairly predictable IF you understand the parameters. Microsoft's marketing does understand where it's operating and will be well aware that its customer base is heavily loaded with irrational people. Most likely they are hearing squeals from that customer base asking where Microsoft's compute cluster solution is because 'we want to buy one'. It would be foolish not to give them one surely?

compliance to standards?

[WinEveryGame]

Per Microsoft document:

"Microsoft Message Passing Interface (MS-MPI) implementation is fully compatible with the reference MPICH2"

I guess given the fact that Microsoft is pathetically behind Linux when it comes to high performance computing, they may actually play by the rules here.

Anyone has an insight on this one? Do they have a API lock-in strategy here as well?

Not for everyone... but think ISVs

[WoTG]

Ok, this isn't exactly going to be a hit with the scientific HPC community who already have all the clustering software that they need. But, think about MS's best customers, corporations. Imagine a new scheduling module for an ERP. If the model is complex enough, and if it has enough components and rules, it can easily become a major burden for a single server. And no, database clustering isn't necessarily the same -- not everything can be coded as a SQL statement, and even if they can, it isn't necessarily a smart way to apply a particular algo to a set of data. A Microsoft Windows based HPC unit would be perfect for the independent software vendor to use to power their new module -- assuming of course that the ERP itself runs on Windows. Odds are good that at least the client-side application is Windows compatible.

Heh!

[jd]

Microsoft delivered the keynote speech for the Supercomputer conference SC|05 in Seattle last year and had a huge stand in the main hallway. Most people were walking straight past it and were gathering round the stands offering free Linux CDs. (I would really like to see at least one of the BSDs to add something like bproc - Linux has some amazing capabilities and those can and are used in many applications, but NetBSD has better I/O throughput and there are many cases where cluster applications are I/O-bound rather than CPU-bound or feature-bound.)

Microsoft's MPI implementation is, if I understand their materials correctly, based on MPICH (a BSD-licensed Open Source product) with some in-house fine tuning. MPICH is a good reference implementation but is not terribly fast and is getting to be long in the tooth. Far as I know, it doesn't have much in the way of fault tolerance in it, either. LAMPI and OpenMPI are built for speed (although I've found OpenMPI has room for substantial improvement) and have some fault tolerance support. So, they don't seem to be using an amazing architecture.

Last, but by no means least, Microsoft's freebies were limited to an Opteron-specific Windows 2003 Cluster Edition beta and a cookie. By comparison, many others had booklets on what their products did, papers on the theoretical work being done, working demos (the molecular modeler with forced feedback was amazing) and some highly knowledgeable geeks to answer detailed technical questions.

Microsoft may - someday - be an interesting player in the cluster market. Right now, though, they really don't seem to get what it is all about. I'm not trying to bash Microsoft here, they really don't have a product that is useful for the high-performance market, and seem to have the wrong libraries and interfaces for using the servers in a load-balancing, fail-over or distributed storage environment. This isn't to say the other vendors were perfect - I saw many areas that were horribly inefficient and poorly implemented - but rather that Microsoft would have done better to have come back from the show and re-thought what it was that they wanted the Cluster Edition to do.

Re:Heh!

[x-caiver]

Microsoft's freebies were limited to an Opteron-specific Windows 2003 Cluster Edition beta and a cookie.

The beta worked on both the AMD and the Intel x64 hardware.

By comparison, many others had booklets on what their products did, papers

There were papers on what the product was. I got a little USB memory key, it was only like 32 megs so not super useful, but free, that had some documents on it. I'll assume that they were smart enough to print those documents out to hand out after the USB keys ran out.

working demos (the molecular modeler with forced feedback was amazing)

Right next to the booth with the 'cookie' were stations with somewhere between 5 and 8 different companies showing off their software sitting on top of the CCS. There were fluid dynamics, car crash simulation, and a couple others. Some of the demos were kinda lame so I didn't pay much attention to them, and a couple of the monitors were showing the same software doing different things, so I'm not sure the exact count.

and some highly knowledgeable geeks to answer detailed technical questions.

There were developers and feature PMs (the guys who write the specs that the devs implement) standing around. I bet that they had a passing knowledge of how their system worked.

I didn't stick around to watch the MS presentation so I can't comment on that. You are right that there were a bunch of other booths that were absolute disasters though.

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.

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:Cautiously optimistic

[san]

Your comment should be modded funny, not insightful.

The only reason you need a HPC cluster is -- indeed -- High Performance Computing. That means you're going to use as many cycles (or messages passed) as you can get from that $50K+ cluster you've just bought. This easily precludes anything but a fast compiled language like Fortran or C (and no, Java with JIT or .net are *not* fast enough. I've tried).

The comment about domain specific languages in your blog for HPC purposes is true: Fortran is exactly that.

Re:Most programmers who use HPC

[nixascyborg]

Thing is; 'most' programmers wouldn't know what HPC, let online how to program for it. MS wants companies to believe that this kind of programmer (or admin) can set-up, program against and run HPC clusters with little training other than Win2003 & VS.NET 2003/2005. If this is true or not is irrelevant; as long as company CTO's/CIO's/CEO's believe it, no one cares about the real technical merit of the statement.
And they do, because they are usually managers who use Word and PPT sometimes and play golf with one of Ballmers' boys; dunno if this is true worldwide, but it is here in the Netherlands. And yes I know this from experience, not from reading it in a blog.
The MS marketing story to managers that are not indept technical is a very strong one; choose Windows, you'll pay, for instance 20 times $500 and use your current Win2003 admins for installing/running and your current devvers or *any* Indian $3/hour company to write your software, versus; pay nothing for the licenses, hire new, hard to get Linux admins for $3000/month, hire even more hard to get HPC / C programmer (also hard to come by when outsourcing...) for the Linux variety. Bottom line; pay, as company, Windows; 10k + 20k computers one time extra for your environment, Linux: pay 20k computers + 40k/year + x * 100k for development.
True or not, this is a strong salespitch which does work on the golfcourse and a lot of companies needing this will go for it, as they have done for other MS technologies which make no sense (embedded? webservers? datacenters? databases? storage software? ... Linux is 'better' than Windows in most cases, but still those markets grow for MS...).

Re:The First???

[Bert64]

Does it also need a hard disk in every machine? Imagine all the extra heat produced by 500 superfluous hard drives. All the clusters i've built have been diskless, and booted from the network (or from a floppy, i did produce such a ghetto-cluster from old hardware once as an example)

Dooom

[MrPsycho]

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

I just can't see any hope for MS

[10Ghz]

I made this comment on Ars Technica, and I'll just repeat it here as well.

I just can't see any future in this. There are few things working against MS here:

a) Price. In the large-scale, the price they are asking would mean lesser nodes. Instead of paying for Windows, the customers could just use Linux and add extra nodes to the cluster.

b) source. Yes it does matter. In markets like this, the people running the cluster do fiddle with things in order to make it go faster. They can't do that with Windows.

c) Ease of use. Well, the people who make clusters are usually not morons, so I don't really see any real need for "point 'n click" GUI for creating clusters. And maybe that GUI could impose a bit more overhead to the system? And creating Linux-clusters is relatively easy.

d) Momentum. Linux has companies like SGI, Cray, IBM and others using and improving it. And there are universities involved as well. Those companies really know Linux and they REALLY know HPC. Microsoft has no real know-how regarding HPC.

e) Familiarity. This time, people know Linux. MS is trying to beat an entrenched competitor. MS has succeeded in doing this before, but they did it by undercutting the competition. This time they are competing against something that is free. And their competitor has the advantages mentioned in A, B, C and D, all of which matter to the target-audience.

Re:Absurdity can be profitable

[hackstraw]

...emphasise the fact that purchasing is based on emotion, not rationality. Some 80-90% of all sales are emotion-driven and then sometimes post-facto justified by selectively picking facts.

Maybe with things like cars and clothes, but clusters are merely machines to crunch numbers. Kinda like a big calculator, and little emotion goes into designing and using them. Its bang/buck. Thats it.

Microsoft _may_ be able to sell this HPC edition to some PHB out of emotion who is completely clueless and has clueless admins as well, but an OS has little to do with an HPC system. In fact, the less of the OS the better. Most of the time, HPC apps are in user land. The OS does basic memory management and I/O, but that is it.

Most all clusters are Linux. Why? Its good and cheap. You don't need the scalability and robustness of say Solaris, because you (typically, almost 100% of the time) only have one thread per processor. Yes, I know with large SMP machines, the OS can and does matter, but those rarely have the bang/buck ratio of clusters. The two big guys that have done this over the years (large SMP/NUMA/NUMAcc, etc) are SGI and Cray. And both of those companies are hard for cash right now. IBM probably does not make money, or much money off of their large number crunching systems, but they are probably viewed as RND, not a "for profit" good or service (I could be entirely wrong here regarding IBM, but thats my hunch).

I don't know what Microsoft is doing with this product. Like someone else said, its probably just a "me too!" thing. In looking at their "details", they do not mention using desktop machines at night. The is a BIG miss by them, because that would be one of the only things that could even make this a marketable item for an already primarily MS outfit.

The more I think about this, the more silly this sounds. Yeah, I'm an anti-MS guy, but I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but this product seems completely worthless. Actually, now that I learned that this is an only 64bit offering, I believe this is a way for MS to sell a product for beta/stress testing of their 64bit server offerings.

To close this post, from the FAQ:

Q. How does a Windows-based compute cluster compare with a cluster running UNIX or Linux?
A. There is little substantive difference, but UNIX-based solutions should be fully ported to Windows to realize the full benefits of the Windows operating system. There are several differences between UNIX-based operating systems and Windows. For example, I/O operations and threading are different on UNIX-based systems than they are on Windows. I/O intensive applications will benefit from using Windows native I/O APIs rather than UNIX style I/O APIs.

Emphasis mine. The second bolded part is important. That porting is expensive and time consuming. Especially when its common for codes to be 30+ years old and designed for UNIX systems. Sounds like vendor lockin to me. Wow, typical Microsoft.

DUPE!

[x2A]

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

MS and serious engineers

[asky]

I think MS has a lot more in-roads to technical computing that slashdotters realize.

While working at NASA Ames, I found a lot of technical work on Windows by people who are mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineers. Applications included: structural/mechanical CAD for fabrication, programs to drive test and measurement equipment, MATLAB to derive simulation models, VxWorks embedded RTOS development.

The universal applications that I saw every engineer use were MS Word and PowerPoint. (LaTeX and troff are largely a lost art; even FrameMaker if used by engineers was running on Windows.) This meant that virtually every serious engineer had a Windows box, and possibly a UNIX box for specialized work as well. Most of these guys understand Laplace transforms, but not regular expressions. They were far more likely to use MATLAB than Perl.

There are, of course, serious software developers there who don't know Laplace transforms, and understand UNIX tools and open source. But this is a different crowd from engineers doing analytical work. (NASA Ames also has a serious supercomputing operation, e.g., the Columbia cluster of 10,240 Linux nodes built by SGI. When you have flow models like protrusions between thermal tiles, this is where you go.)

With budgets really tight and reductions in headcount, they stretch dollars as far as they will go; which means, if it will run on Windows, it's hard to justify another box. Furthermore, system support is outsourced to a department whose sole purpose is to keep computing alive, which means a very limited number of Windows and Mac OS configurations.

Having interacted with engineers involved in aerospace in other parts of the United States, the stuff I saw at NASA Ames seems pretty typical. (When I mentioned this to a Hubble astronomer, he was completely stunned.)

Now I don't expect Windows Compute Clusters in NASA anytime soon. But some engineering software vendor is going to decide that they can extend their product line by bringing compute power to the individual engineer through this mechanism. At that point, a hybrid solution of Windows desktop and Linux compute servers is going to be hard to justify, particularly if it requires additional department resource to make it work.

Actually they don't but

[crovira]

now that super computing has been turned into clustering and there are lots of people doing it (like it hit >$x billion,) it has apppeared on microsoft's radar.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the terrain's already covered by Linux and those systems are a moving target with cost-benefit lines that Microsoft CAN'T possibly over take. (The software is $-free and open source and the users WANT collaboration.)

Its a technological death trap for Microsoft. (I can just hear the SNAP. :-)

Re:Absurdity can be profitable

[iluvcapra]

should be fully ported to Windows to realize the full benefits of the Windows operating system

I got the impression from TFA that the major feature HPC Edition had to offer was its handy and clean interface with Visual Studio, allowing all the CLI masses to write software for a compute cluster all their own (without having to deal with learning a different platform).

Would this have any effect on the HPC market? I can't see people with existing installations+software biting, but I can see it tempting to businesses building new installations and wanting to minimize training costs, etc, even if what they're buying won't really give you a full "H" in HPC. If a business IT department has passed the dictum: "This is a Windows only environment," and a manager in that business needs a compute cluster, he can either pick a fight with his IT department or bend over and take the Windows HPC software (which MS will give them for peanuts this first time around).

Unrelated, Near future prediction:

1. MS wil require the cluster edition in order to run distributed MSSQL
2. The number of "clusters" in the world will go up stupendously (MS will define this statistic as counting all machines which run a clustering OS, regardless of the application)
3. Instantly 80% of all "clusters" will be running Windows HPC
4. This fact will appear in marketing everywhere
5. Profit