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Unholy Matrimony? Microsoft and Cray
fetusbear writes with a ZDNet story that says "'Microsoft and Cray are set to unveil on September 16 the Cray CX1, a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008. The pair is expected to tout the new offering as "the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered," with pricing starting at $25,000.' Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."
I mean, come on, this thing's probably gotta play some pretty good games....
Let's see Toms Hardware and Anandtech put one of these babies through their paces!
My question is, how big does your Word document have to be for it to take a second to scroll from the top to the bottom of the document.
This is my sig.
Man, now even with buying a supercomputer we have to pay the Microsoft tax. We should sign a petition for them to sell the computers with Linux on them. Then we can drop the price to $24,900. That's WAY better.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
n/t
Cray CX1, a compact supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008.
Apparently even a Cray can't run Vista?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Oh please. This really isn't "news for nerds". Maybe news for fools, but all of us here have known for months that this would be coming. I mean, what else can you imagine that would run Vista smoothly?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I guess not even a supercomputer could run Vista properly...
Thank God for evolution.
I'll be able to run Crysis and Prince of Persia at the same time.
So is this just going to be some $25k generic x86 type deal?
Finally, Microsoft has teamed up with a partner that can supply a computer capable of running vista smoothly.
Note, a small part of me died in writing this. Its an obvious joke that will be repeated ad naseum through out the comments, from this post to post #453.
I bet Symantec Antivirus can get it on its knees.
-- Cheers!
I wish I had a beowulf cluster of these but it wouldn't matter because I live in Cincinnati where we have no power.
Oh well...hot grits troll instead?
O.B.: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things?
...is not actually a "desktop". It's not even "a" computer. It's a cluster, and Cray could definately do better than this. Especially considering Unisys has built computers (no, not clusters) with a lot of processors a long time, many of them Windows Capable. So... Cray builds a cluster, Microsoft gets some free ad space for HPC Server. Hooray!
Server 2008 is the same kernel as Vista.
This is Geraldo...
It is getting awfully cold down here!
The snow is covering lava... and you
can see the massive damage that it is
causing to the very foundations!
How long before someone with a spare $25k gets one and puts Linux on it? And suddenly it's running circles around the resource hog Micro$oft. Could prove embarrassing for Microsoft - tho they're used to embarrassment, and for Cray for letting Microsoft taint their hardware with Windows.
From the article:
If space is a problem, not to worry, itâ(TM)s compact enough to fit in a broom closet.
From the summary:
... it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft.
I know, the summary was an attempt to bash MS.
This thing is able to generate the BSOD faster than anything you've EVER imagined.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Now with Windows, we can give our supercomputer the same great performance of your desktop system! I really can't even imagine what they were thinking. This must be a MS subsidized sales gimmick.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Why is Cray Supercomputing is a loosing strategy?
1. As standard computers increase they take over more and more of Super Computers jobs. Sure there may always be a need for something ahead of Mores Law but as more and more applications can be successfully run on standard computing hardware the need for super computers lessons. Back in Crays Hay Day Crays were used for all sorts of things businesses, education, etc... But now they are limited to more limited research.
2. Clouds and Clusters. Sure they may not be as good as a super computer for some jobs. However they can do the work that was previously limited to super computers only. Creating less demand.
3. Competition from more diverse companies. I hate to say it but IBM can afford to make the limited super computers for the reducing demand because they can make it up with mainframes and normal non-supercomputing big boxes.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You add a couple of high end video cards and an additional 2gb of ram. Only the standardd configuration could not run vista smoothly.
Fight Spammers!
instead of bloggy blather, you can go to the source.
Is what they will get after crashing Windows at Cray speed.
If Cray would have spent the amount of time and money equivalent to what was put into this deal at their end by recoding FreeBSD to their needs, they could have rebranded the result as their own OS/hardware package a la Apple without all of the bugs and security holes that MS has brought to the table.
(And I'm a Linux guy! How hard is this stuff to figure out?!)
The man is spinning in his grave!
Just let Cray pass into history.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Yes, but will it run Linux?
In other news, you can now buy a Pyrex(TM) cake pan and Pyrex spatula to go with your M$ Cray.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
WTF?
Everyone else has probably done the usual "how fast can a Cray show a BSoD?" gags, so all I was left with was:
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
I was joking when I floated the idea of the Large Hardon Collider running Vista.
(I'd think that would lead to an immediate loss of Large Hardon myself.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
So with windows bloat, won't this thing perform slightly slower than a Pentium 66 running the latest Ubuntu live CD? And does MS still charge per CPU? That $25,000 could be just for the OS.
Isn't that an oxymoron? With multiple cores does it give a full color screen of death?
...and I wasn't disappointed.
No sig today...
We finally see the minimum recommended hardware spec for the next version of Windows... And I thought Vista was a resource hog. Talk about code bloat!
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.
New Slogan for M$ and Cray... "Giving Crackers (Hackers?) the computing power to PWN!!!!1
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
won't be able to run crysis
If they're running their shopping cart on it. I just tried to configure one and got the following error. I mean, honestly, what has happened to Cray if they're releasing applications that don't handle simple CRUD exceptions? This would earn an F in high school level computer science and released into production should be enough to tank their stock:
Server Error in '/configurator' Application.
An item with the same key has already been added.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Stack Trace:
[ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added.] ...
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.42; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.42
Cray has become so Microsoft that you can't configure your CX1 using FF! Check it out yourself here.
did linux stop working on cray?
Good people go to bed earlier.
I've put Linux on both Mainframes and Supercomputers. What's really funny on those systems is the following:
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
That's right, you can basically do a "Control-ALT-DEL" and reboot the great big box.
This really annoys the old farts.
The Apple Lisa would cost about $20,000 in today's money. The two aren't related, but the jokes about a $25,000 desktop made me think of when PCs really did cost a whole lot. Just food for thought =)
(And yes, I am perfectly aware that the Lisa was a failure)
Microsoft and Cray: never has your computer crashed so fast.
StuporComputer?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
These are just standard issue Intel PC's wired up in a cluster like every other modern supercomputer & sold under the Cray brand.
Resistance is futile - you will be assimilated! A final nail in the coffin for traditional Unix. Now, Microsoft scales from tiny devices running in watches, to super-computers! Even changes to Windows 2008 servers allow administrators to run the OS on routers (without a UI, even solitare is removed). The arguments for Unix in any data center are almost gone.
Windows HPC Server 2008 is dying!
No data, no cry
it only takes .000000000000000000000000000001 seconds to crash and display a blue screen of death, instead of the usual 3 minutes.
Cray is just barely more relevant to modern HPC than Silicon Graphics. Whether they're making a PC that runs Linux or a PC that runs Windows, it's still a PC. Yes, a massively parallel one, but it's a PC. The XMT series is the only really innovative thing that distinguishes Cray from the next guy down the street.
Computing has come to the point where commodity hardware can be almost endlessly strung together with commodity equipment to achieve the computing level necessary for most purposes. Furthermore, in the rare cases where it's necessary to go beyond this level, the cost of building a custom machine that outperforms commodity equipment is roughly one to two orders of magnitude more. Bottom line, it's just not cost effective for almost anyone to buy the cool high-end non-commodity gear anymore.
Which means that Cray will be reduced to a company that makes interconnects, like SGI is. Neat engineering, but the interconnects are now becoming commodity gear as well, which means that these companies won't be able to make enough profit to keep engineering as the focus of the company. They'll be forced into being a support/service company of their commodity hardware sold at a meagre 5% profit margin.
The one escape is gone as well--pushing Linux and Windows and the primary (or only) OSes means that they won't have anything special to offer. If, for instance, SGI had aggressively driven Irix, things might have been different for them.
The last front for development in current computing is in the labs of Intel and AMD, working on commodity gear. The days of boutique computing are dying.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So should we call this a MicroCray or CraySoft?
What's done's in the past, forever shall last.
Work is work; life is life; fair is not!
You can have up to 8 "blades". each blade is a dual socket Xeon board with it's own RAm and graphics. The blades are in effect dual CPU Xeon PCs. The blades are connected to an high performance Ethernet switch which ties them together in a cluster.
So if you call eight PCs connected to a network a "supper computer" then this is it.
This is a big, bright, bold statement that Cray is no longer serious about what they are doing.
Is there a better way to make your corporate slump more obvious? Seriously, aligning yourself with Cray is like putting an "I am obsolete" sticker on your lapel.
First we get Seinfeld, then Cray...I think Microsoft would like us all to go back to the '90s and play nicely together again.
Vista jokes aside, this is an HPC/Server system, not a desktop. And as such, it's a long way from being the most expensive Windows system you can buy. A fully loaded Sun Fire X4600 M2 can run you more than $35K.
TFS stated: "Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft." .. but if you are going to summarize an article, summarize it so you don't lead down the path of flame wars and stuff.
.. What the hell are they going to run on this? SQL server? Exchange? I mean what MS app requires a Cray to run? They are not splicing DNA on MS platforms .. so I guess it is more of a "marketing" thing than anything else.
Believe it or not, MS has been making server OSes for the better part of 2 decades.
Not a fan boy
That said
Actually, their prices have been steadily declining. Due to competition, I suppose.
The big HPC customers, are actually increasing the size of their machines much FASTER than moore's law. Thus the number of processors in a supercomputer is growing, and growing rapidly. With MPI jobs of 100,000 cores, the demands on the interconnect go up, and the difference between a really scalable interconnect, and commodity clusters, becomes more obvious.
Also, the big HPC companies (Cray, NEC, IBM) make their money selling the hardware, but a lot of what they do is software. It's one thing to build a computer that can perform a quadrillion floating point operations per second; making it actually useable, and sorta stable, is another thing entirely.
The cool thing is that it's powered by an inductive coupling to Seymor Cray spinning in his grave!
What the hell kind of legacy requirements makes someone with a Cray need Windows? "Uhh.. well, someone emailed me this Excel spreadsheet..."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
As someone who does science HPC for a living, I am confused. Who actually wants Windows for HPC? What value does it provide that Linux or UNIX doesn't? I've never heard of a single use case where Linux or some UNIX wasn't better by miles.
Imagine a Beowulf...... ah nevermind....
MS has never sold a desktop, it is the most expensive, the cheapest and the prettiest.
It's definitely not a supercomputer. I think it classifies either as a micro or more likely a minicomputer.
From my memory of computing science class...
Microcomputer: Fits on a desk.
Minicomputer: Fits in a room or closet.
Supercomputer: Fits in a building.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong? I remember my old Wang mini like it was yesterday...
I offer names for this project:
Clustered Crawfish
Coagulated Crawdad
Conjugated Crayfish
(LOL: captcha is: "condom" (and, yes, i took a screenshot of it...))
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I just want to know if it'll run Duke Nukem Forever!
Of course not! It's a Cray. It can run infinite loops in a finite amount of time. Duke Nukem?... probably about thirty-five seconds.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
in less than 10 minutes?
How many flops?
you /. nerds are sooo L33t!!! Blind Microsoft bashing with zero technical knowledge got old in '99.
Now go run *nothing* on your precious nix desktops.
"Although this would be the lowest cost hardware ever offered by Cray, it would also be the most expensive desktop ever offered by Microsoft."
Funny, since MS has never made a desktop before, AFAIK. Come to think of it, they aren't making this one either...
I love it when a single sentence is wrong in more than one way at the same time. (And don't tell me that "desktop" meant "desktop OS" because the name of the product being used is Windows HPC 2008 Server.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Has it occured to anyone that although their underlying os is windows, who in their right mind would run MS SQL or similar when trying to model complex maths.
I try to imagine MS SQL running the complex db, but I can't really see it.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Who is Simon? And why does he deploy webservices under his user account? I got this when trying to configure one of these 'workstations'. . . . [ArgumentException: An item with the same key has already been added.] System.ThrowHelper.ThrowArgumentException(ExceptionResource resource) +48 System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Insert(TKey key, TValue value, Boolean add) +986373 System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Add(TKey key, TValue value) +10 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.QuoteManager.GetItem(Int32 id) in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:1537 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.QuoteManager.GetItemsList() in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:1525 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.QuoteManager.CleanExpiredQuotes() in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:1506 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.QuoteManager.RefreshData() in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:1495 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.Quote.CreateItem() in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:922 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.Quote.CreateModelStateQuote(ModelState modstate) in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:1005 VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel.QuoteManager.CreateItem(ModelState modstate) in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator.ObjectModel\Quote.cs:1625 VXTECH.Configurator.ReviewQuote.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in C:\Users\Simon\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\VXTECH.Configurator.2\VXTECH.Configurator\ReviewQuote.aspx.cs:21 System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +15 System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +34 System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99 System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +47 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1061
...to getting decent performance from Windows while simultaneously running anti-virus software!
...that they'll need Bill Gates *and* Jerry Seinfeld *and* Steve Ballmer *and* Julia Louis-Dreyfus *and* Michael Richards to advertise it.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Imagine BSODs happening at lightning speed!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I can't get no, satisfaction.
Finally, a machine that meets Vista minimum requirements.
I'm sure I could configure a Mac Pro that costs more than that, and it will run Windows too.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
I like how the section of the Cray website for customizing a computer doesn't work in Firefox, only IE 6.x+.
Great, so how fast does it reboot?
Oops.
The simple solution to software inefficiencies is to put it on bigger iron. The software can be slow and resource intensive but the bigger iron solves the problems.
It is not elegant but it solves the problem.
You can dress a pig.
VistaRunsSlow knelt and sifted the sand of the arena through his fingers. The sand mixed with the blood on his hands forming a dull red paste. He knew he probably wouldn't live to see the day's end.
Throughout the day the battle in the SlashArena had been fierce - many had fallen before him, including some of his beloved brothers in arms: Cluster Beowulf, the great Russian InSoviet, 123Profit!, and yes, even his beloved brother CrysisRunSlow. One by one he had seen them beaten to death for the mere amusement of the crowd. It didn't even seem like they enjoyed the spectacle, but were duly observing the match like some kind of gruesome ritual. There was no honor here! Only death, and pain. Is this what they wanted to see? Did this actually amuse them? VistaRunsSlow could not see how. Already today he had fought 385 battles, and not one ModTrophy to call his own. It was like he didn't exist - his life had little purpose than to fill the arena with mindless content.
No matter - the time was before him. He slowly rose to his feet, to the quiet murmor of the crowd. PhasmatisApparatus approached him, shield in hand, grinning from ear to ear. There was no hint of subtleness in his eyes, no mirth, no telling glance that someone of nobleness approached him. VistaRunsSlow could only pray for an end to the merciless beating - a quick death, that was the best this day could afford him. Yet still, if he could, he would fight on. This day he would live proud - this day a joke would not die in vain!
Like what you read? Read more here.
After LSE fiasco last week, I cant believe that people are even thinking about running Microsoft windows on their servers let alone on supercomputers!
for Windows 7
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Serving up one of the most crappy and broken corporate websites I've seen lately, Cray bedazzles me. They can't be serious, can they? Running a high throughput, custom piece of hardware on Windows as the prime OS? ... Unbelievable.
What Oomph does this thing have anyway? 16 Quad-Core Xeons. 64GB per node. Doesn't sound like that much of a a big deal to me. What corners could Cray have cut with the system archiecture itself to justify the hype? Won't a smalish blade-box or something simular from Sun or IBM wipe the floor with this thing? ... Just wondering.
Anybody with deeper insights on this?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
not trolling boys, so relax, its an OPINION.
For many of us coders, geeks and otherwise technically inclined here on Slashdot, this issue is one where for some, it is an emotional outlet, where few others exist. Others have issues pertaining to Sex, Families, LIFE, and other things to massage our emotional minds over.
To many of us, Microsoft represents something we love to hate, because we can. There is a disconnect between what works in technology, and what works in business. Many of us downplay the importance of Marketing, Leverage, Tie-in, Competition Analysis, and other stuff you don't learn in your CS program, but only in Business school.
We have a hard time seeing Microsoft as a business, responsible to its shareholders above all else, we embrace those orgs who see themselves as some kind of technical crusader, ready to right the wrongs in our industry, using truth, justice, and the American way.
It is the rare geek who can get beyond the technical arguments and embrace the quite logical reasons for why Microsoft has so much marketshare today. The concept of "Barriers to Entry" is rarely discussed when pushing an alternative to MS Office, Exchange Server, or other Microsoft tools.
Instead, we choose to blame the stupid CIO, who in a moment of insanity, decides to go with the Microsoft solution, like 90% of his peers, when he could be that brave, intrepid warrior for good, by going with Linux Servers, Open Office and more.
I mean, who actually uses those integrated Calendar/Scheduling thingies anyway, dammit? If I want to book a conference room 2 weeks in advance, I'll hang a post-it note on the damn door! Easy, and I dont have to deal with integrity testing that blasted Exchange database!
You see, there is nobility in suffering.
If it takes me a week to get my DVD-RW to burn disks under Linux, who cares, if I am a better person for the effort?
It is simply a case of the quest for perfection acting as an enemy of the "good enough".
This is a highly simplistic argument, tonque in cheek, and all that, but true.
And, as always, I got karma to burn bitches, so if you disagree, give it your best shot!
with all that cutting edge HW isn't that just gonna make the BSoD happen sooner :-)
and
Now then - aside from asking "Why waste that kind of processing power on a desktop?" (which I am) - er . . . (when) will it run a server OS like Linux? Oh, and I don't want the Microsoft software, thanks very much. Can I get that as naked iron?
I wonder how many M$ licenses they'll sell vs. how many RHEL pre-installs they'll be doing?
I did determine that you can't run a configuration with Firefox, they only support IE browsers. Guess Microsoft has given up on trying to convert us all. I like the look of the XT5 better, anyway. And it comes with Linux.
It's not that the PC manufacturers don't care, it's that they can't justify the cost, given the needs of the customers. The Cray X1 had 32 memory channels, and a time when most high-end servers had 2. To do that, you need to have a lot of pins coming out of the processor die, and lot of traces through the motherboard, and a lot of sockets full of memory sticks. As a result, you pay $100,000 per board. It's not just about engineering costs, it's also about a really high unit cost.
PC makers aren't interested in more memory channels, as it increases the cost of processors, motherboards, and of filling the memory slots with dimms. For most PC applications, the best way to improve memory bandwidth is to increase the size of the L2/3 caches, thus more of the data is in high-bandwidth on-die memory. Not so much with HPC applications.
There is one area, in a PC, where real memory bandwidth maters, and matters a lot: GPUs. The high-end gamer cards are pushing the memory envelope, at least a little. GDDR5 has quite a bit better bandwidth than the DDR we see on CPUs, and much wider buses. You still can't use graphics cards for HPC apps, as they don't support 64bit floating point math. When they do, however, I think there might be some clever ways to use all that bandwidth; much like an old Cray vector machine. Soon is what I'm hearing.
That's a bit like taking a Bugatti Veron, take the tyres off their rims, fill the inside up with concrete except where the driver sits, take 7 spark plugs out and use what is left for towing caravans, running the engine on low grade fuel so it has to tear engine timings down not to end up pinging. Desperate, a waste and seriously pointless.
Let's start with some basics here: you cluster because you need task division and resilience. You START that with a stable OS, i.e. one that doesn't need clustering to start with to stay online. Only THEN do you add clustering to scale up, because it means you won't be putting a damn expensive plaster on an OS deficiency.
Next it's OS efficiency. Oh, sod it. I won't bother. It's too silly for words. It'll be a very good gaming machine or a nice room heater with a nice blue BSOD glow (most expensive heat & light ever). For anything else, I guess you can get a decent Beowulf for that sort of money.
Cray - you guys must be DESPERATE to give your name on this. And I mean REALLY desperate.
The new box won't fail because of the Blue Screen of Death, it will simply be the Kiss of Death for Cray. Whenever an independent hardware maker that runs *NIX makes a deal with the MS dev!l to try to broaden their appeal by converting to Wintel their business quickly tanks. They erode the base for their proprietary iron, and soon they are bankrupt, often within a year. Watch for Cray to go the way of DEC.
I would rather buy some off the shelf commodity hardware, download a copy of perceus and have a real hpc cluster, oh and for under 25k because your not having to buy the os and it supports openmpi, and virtualization and built on Linux. you could drop half that, get into an starter cluster that can give you a hpl run your not embarrassed to show.
Cray use to know supercomputing, now they have been replaced by like ten open source places, warewulf, perceus, rocks, any of them could build a better hpc setup on top of 25k of Intel or AMD gear, hell a rack of cell powered ps3's, hehe.
Blind leading the naked right off the cliff, hehe.
If you have to turn it all off in Vista to make it run properly, and lets face it, it's mostly cosmetic 'upgrading' from XP, then why upgrade? Granted, we do get a wake up reminder every few minutes to authorize some program that needs to access you hard drive ;)
I wonder if they will leave the UAC on for the Cray?
I pine for pine.
that email reader sublime.
it was faster than mutt
and sucked less than a slut.
that email reader sublime!
It's about as powerful as my lawnmower.
Why would _anyone_ go through the pain of porting a complex number-crunching scientific/engineering whatever
app to Windows and then even have to maintain it on Windows? From a technological perspective this combination
makes as much sense as mounting a lawnmower under a sailing boat or wearing shoe laces made out of peanut butter.
Obviously a Marketing / Public Relations tool with the hope of associating Microsoft with high performance
computing, one wonders how much work has really gone from this minimal prototype to a reasonable product?
Keep in mind that Microsoft has more pressing worries with their less than successful Vista on the desktop.
SGI actually made a move to run Windows instead of Irix on their machines 10 years ago. There was a project called Farenheit, which was I think touted as the future of OpenGL on SGI computers running windows. Sometime right after proposing this abomination, SGI died.
(Cried Out Loud) or maybe WOL (Whimpered Out Loud) when I read the headline and summary. Why...oh why...
I wonder noone pointed it out before. If you try to customize before buy it throws you "This section of the Website is compatible with only Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x and higher. We are presently working on supporting other browsers. Sorry for this inconvenience. " maybe time to rethink strategy when most of the skilled IT people are moving away from windows... check yourself: https://cx1.cray.com/default.asp
...but XP will still run faster and with fewer BSODs.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
My personal impression when I read this was, "oh sh*t, even Cray doesn't care about correctly engineered technology any more"
I think, this will do nothing else but damage Cray's reputation. I don't even want to think of a supercomputer that can't send a signal to its weather forecasting process, because what was started as "weatherforecasting.exe" was just silently renamed to "weathe~1.exe" just because of by a misdesigned stoneage personal computer operating system.
(actually happens in real life; almost exactly this situation happened in the company where I work in a project lately)
The specification document says it runs up to eight xeon blades. From my understanding a so called super computer should have more computing power...
M$ and Cray? seems like a fit,.. most Crays are in Blue cases, M$ operating systems render Blue Screens. so on a Cray, M$ would just render blue screens even faster, with more catastrophic effects.
This is both ridiculous and hilarious. The reason Microsoft finds a market at all for their malware is because business majors, especially the ones studying IT management, are idiots.
Didn't Microsoft try this before with DEC? That marriage didn't last too long, if I remember correctly.
Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4,
Yeah, but does it run gentoo?
Yes, that's a personal ideological statement, not a supported statement of fact. Too bad. Fortunately, Cray is (IMO) also offering a real server OS to go with their hardware.
well, it will be the first
Really Vista Ready PC on the market...
I completely agree there are business case barriers to SWITCHING (e.g. you might be heavily dependent on a Windows only Jet-DB application, but that doesn't make it a stable solution.)
Absent that, though, you've just explained why everyone should buy a Mac!
I really don't buy your DVD-RW argument in the context that you've used it, because while a) it's much more likely to take longer to setup some pieces of hardware in Linux, b) It's MUCH more likely for a Windows box without a hardware problems to suddenly start behaving weirdly and take AT LEAST as long to massage back into shape - and you never know when it's going to happen.
I DO think there are legitimate barriers to switching. I do also think that a lot of those decisions are made via intellectual inertia: you hired MS people to work on your stuff, so they only consider MS solutions. But I do ALSO think that quite a bit of it is decisively based on short sighted decision making and/or bad or mis-information about the maintenance of those solutions. Linux is much more likely to have the work be at the beginning of the process, so whether Windows is 'easier' depends a lot on over what timescale you're talking.
Ben
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I'm having trouble finding the max number of processors and memory Win HPC can handle. Anyone know what it's upper limits are on a single machine (not clustered)?
--- Just say no to negativity.
Red as it passes you by and moves away, blue as it comes at you.
How do they keep 'em patched, I wonder? Must be some kind of clustering scheme, since we all know that most Windows patches require rebooting, yes?
Yeah, give me enough hardware and I can make almost any OS (MS-DOS anyone) do whatever is needed in a multitasking server environment. Then again, Microsoft is quite famous for delivering software which requires (b)leeding edge hardware to run adequately.