At 09:02 PM 6/11/2006, Joe Landman wrote:
(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.
Read it in a MS centric context... It HAS been too expensive and difficult
to use effectively, if you start with the premise that you're going to use
only MS products. Although, there has been a version of MPICH out there
that runs on NT 4.0, etc. for years now, there are a number of other
painful things when trying to build a MS Windows cluster, having mostly to
do with cluster management (seeing what's going on on the other nodes,
managing configurations). A lot of MS "clusters" are really more like
"networks of workstations that happen to be running intercommunicating
software" and are conceptually, little different than [EMAIL PROTECTED] (well,
maybe a bit more sophisticated..)
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.
I suspect that the entire cluster market is a tiny, tiny pimple on the
behind of MS total sales, and the current cluster usage is a tiny fraction
of that. And of that total market, there's no question that some part of
it does find clustering *easy enough*, hence the growth. However, for all
you know, there might be 10 times as many people out who *think* (but don't
necessarily *know*) that it's possible.
There are an enormous number of people who (for a variety of fairly good
reasons) conceive of solving their problem using MS software tools (Visual
C#, e.g.). Having made a casual survey of some C# programmers I know, I
discovered that the possibility of using a cluster to solve some of their
problems wasn't even on the radar screen.
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
<snip>
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.
Exactly.. Load up Visual Studio, Cluster Edition, load the app, compile and go.
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.
I'd guess more as a loadable component within the ".NET framework".
A
James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
