For example, SGI, a high-performance computing specialist with ties to Linux, got a frosty reception on a compute cluster mailing list when it announced support for Windows CCS earlier this year.
"I don't hate Microsoft," said Robert Brown, a professor and compute cluster expert in Duke University's physics department, in a posting to the mailing list. "If anything, I fear it...Microsoft is for all practical purposes completely unregulated, it faces no serious competition, it routinely engages in business practices that make it very difficult for serious competition to ever arise, and it extends all over the world, not just in the United States."
When it comes to HPC, Windows is not the incumbent. "The HPC community has been Unix- and Linux-based for decades," said Gartner analyst Carl Claunch. "The university environments in which most have trained are heavily Linux-centric. The domination of Linux in HPC and in clusters is quite strong."
Among technical advantages of Linux clusters is better maturity, better software choices, broader abilities and a proven ability to run at large scale, Claunch said.
New features
Windows CCS isn't Microsoft's last crack at the market, though. It just released Service Pack 1, which is based on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. That new version makes it possible to bring up a cluster in one fell swoop rather than installing software on each machine individually.
More significant changes will come with CCS version 2, Hansen said, which will be based on the "Longhorn Server" successor to Windows Server 2003. Longhorn Server is due to ship this year, but Hansen declined to say when the CCS revamp will emerge.
Version 2 will feature "simplified development, deployment, operation and integration," Hansen said. Specific improvements will help networking--in particular TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) software and support for larger networks, he said.
For development, Microsoft touts its Visual Studio programming tools. Version 2 will feature better support for software that executes in parallel on a number of machines, he said. Building that parallelism into software is a decades-old challenge in the computer industry.
Microsoft also has struck partnerships with IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and SGI to make it easier for customers to purchase clusters with software already set up. SGI likes having Windows CCS as an option for customers working on animation, for example. "There are a lot of shops that run a lot of Windows applications," and they can use a Windows cluster to speed up work, said Louise Ledeen, a manager for digital content management marketing at SGI.
And even in a market with cultural barriers, pragmatism can win the day. That was the case for Matt Wortman, director of computational biology and information technology at the University of Cincinnati's Genome Research Institute. His group already has Linux clusters, but picked Windows CCS for a 14-node cluster that runs simulation software to analyze drugs' molecular behavior. It integrated easily with researchers' computers, 95 percent of which run Windows, he said.
"I don't care if it's Microsoft or Scyld, (Linux cluster software from Penguin Computing)," Wortman said. "I want to make it easier for the average biologist to find new drugs."
Play video
Many thanks for the valuable information.
Thanks again for your time!
RM to Zune
www.rm-converter.net
Posted by Jason on Monday, April 09 2007 01:56 PM