(sorry in advance for the length) Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote: > Ooh! ISO-9002 Buzzword Compliant marketing.
Hmmm.... not astroturfing here. I opine on http://scalability.org/?p=69 . A few others have linked to this, so we are getting some traffic. Specifically, I am of the opinion that the sentence "but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively" is factually wrong. The reasoning is very simple, and borne out by existing data. If HPC has been both too expensive AND too difficult to use, then why is it as a market growing at 20+% per year? Moreover, as IDC points out that Linux clusters are driving the growth in the HPC market, with this segment currently at about 1/2 of the $9B market and growing at 60+% per year for the past 3 years ... Short version: it is neither too expensive, nor too hard, as people are doing it effectively now, and have been for the last 5+ years, with the growth showing up on the radar 3 years ago. If the statement of too expensive could be applied to Linux clusters, then this fails to explain the observation of the growth. Last I checked, real measurement trumps hypothesis. These aren't windows clusters that are growing, these are Linux clusters. These aren't unix boxen. They are Linux clusters. There must be a reason for this. If the statement of too hard could be applied to the market, one would need to ask exactly what people were buying that was not too hard which is generating all that growth. Since we know the answer (linux clusters), they must not be too hard to use. The systems we put together for our customers who don't care what is under the hood looks a great deal like a large windows disk (or disks) and a web page. Those who care about the details prefer the command line. All this said, and not to disagree with Doug Eadline and others on the technical details, I do think Microsoft has something to offer here, but I think they need to work within the existing community, and not dismiss it out of hand. The latter is the sense I am getting out of the marketing. The folks from Microsoft I have spoken with, Kyril and Patrick, seem to be quite interested in doing the right thing, though with a decidedly Microsoft spin. The problem I see is that the spin and some of the core assumptions are, IMO, incorrect. One expects marketing to be so. Building a go-to-market strategy upon the basis of core assumptions that are not in line with the market reality is dangerous, even for an infinitely deep pocketed corporation. All I suggest is appropriate debunking of the marketing, and drilling into the technological core of what they are going to market. They do have a number of very hard hills to climb, specifically pricing compared to competitors, technological feature lists, interoperability, security, and stability. Most of these are going to work against it. It would be unwise to count them out of the game though. Anyone remember or still use Lotus 123? Wordperfect? May take them a while, and they are persistent. With very deep pockets, lots of patience, and the ability to purchase talent. Linux was able to effectively kill Unix by presenting a single API to write to, a simple stack to deal with, a much larger potential installed base, a lower cost of acquisition. Microsoft has learned from this. Assume that this is their direction. The arguments they presented to me involved driving a wedge between various linux distros, and painting the Linux scene in a similar manner. Their MPI argument (to many stacks) was not a good one, as the same problem exists on windows. But the point is one that I and many others have complained about at some point in time or the other. You have different MPI stacks which are binary incompatible. Which means if the PathScale folks came out with a new hardware device to accelerate networking for folks like LSTC, then the LSTC folks have to relink their app against the new stack. Which is exactly what happened. While some folks here defend this, I want to note that end users don't give a rip about that. They want the new fangled hardware to work. Right away. Without a rebuild of the app. So do the vendors. ISVs don't want a rotating collection of MPI stacks, but one to work with. One API. Each app now needs to decide how many MPI stacks to support on each ABI. You have IA64 with several, AMD64 with several, ia32 with several, ... Each stack adds cost/complexity to them. Again, this is something I have argued for a while. The ISVs as well. They don't want to support Joe's MPI stack, they want one MPI stack per ABI (even better would be one MPI stack and one ABI, but we are not there yet). MPICH runs pretty much everywhere. LAM (which I like a little better) runs fewer places (never been able to get it to work the right way under Cygwin). I can live with MPICH. The problem though is that we have to relink the application for each new networking advance. And customers don't like that. What Microsoft will do is to take away as much of this as they can. I haven't seen it yet, but I believe they will offer MPICH as a DLL, so if PathScale wants to work along side some other device, you can select this at runtime, and just have it work. This is a nice idea. Schedulers are another area, but my impression from speaking with them is that they haven't looked at the market carefully enough yet, or some non-business reasons got in the way of them exploring whats out there. The idea is that they have a good story in some parts, and a very weak story in others. Assume they will improve the weak points. It would make more sense to engage them so that they improve the weak points along reasonable lines. I would rather have them fit in, than try to overtake, as the latter will just piss off the customers when they realize what they want to do is not possible with their shiny new WCC, or they suffer far worse performance than the folks with the Linux cluster due to all those corporate mandated firewalls and copies of Norton running. Joe -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
