first off there are several MPI implementations that run under windows. I know PVM has a windows port - as I work with the group that writes it:)(http://www.csm.ornl.gov/torc). you need an rsh client and server for both I think (you do for PVM) I don't know of any free one that works well at the moment, we use ataman rsh services. The other way to go that I have seen is to use the cygwin tool. Another national lab runs a modest size cluster (~512 node) windows cluster but the use pvm and mpi through a cygwin window. As for stability -well they are about the same. On our 64 node cluster (processor craps out, os craps out, whatever). The fellows on the big IBM SP2 get about the same, and the windowz guys get about the same. When you are running the HPC clustering services you are not running much more than a kernel on each machine so no IE explorer and other BS to crash the system. Remeber when people are running real codes (such as weather modeling, nuclear modelling, and genome searching - what they run on our cluster) it would be the equivalent of you running a process that was computing on an aproximatly 6 gig file, using the processors nearly fully, puching the gigether card to it's limit, and using all available ram (512 per node in our case) for several months - the only way a box gets hit that hard is being used a computation node. So yes, it is entierly possible to build even large HPC clusters from windows, though unless microsoft is going to fund you (as they do the other national lab) I would not recoomend it.
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first off there are several MPI implementations that run under windows. I know PVM has a windows port - as I work with the group that writes it :)(http://www.csm.ornl.gov/torc). you need an rsh client and server for both I think (you do for PVM) I don't know of any free one that works well at the moment, we use ataman rsh services. The other way to go that I have seen is to use the cygwin tool. Another national lab runs a modest size cluster (~512 node) windows cluster but the use pvm and mpi through a cygwin window. As for stability -well they are about the same. On our 64 node cluster (processor craps out, os craps out, whatever). The fellows on the big IBM SP2 get about the same, and the windowz guys get about the same. When you are running the HPC clustering services you are not running much more than a kernel on each machine so no IE explorer and other BS to crash the system. Remeber when people are running real codes (such as weather modeling, nuclear modelling, and genome searching - what they run on our cluster) it would be the equivalent of you running a process that was computing on an aproximatly 6 gig file, using the processors nearly fully, puching the gigether card to it's limit, and using all available ram (512 per node in our case) for several months - the only way a box gets hit that hard is being used a computation node. So yes, it is entierly possible to build even large HPC clusters from windows, though unless microsoft is going to fund you (as they do the other national lab) I would not recoomend it.