There was an interesting thread on MS HPC on this list in the past,
rather than retype I'll post the URL to my older post:
http://www.beowulf.org/archive/2006-June/015721.html
For those that don't want to follow the link -- there is probably a
decent market for the MS HPC product, especially for small or
dedicated systems that may be servicing data collection devices like
lab instruments or imaging systems that live in non-datacenter
environments where single point of contact support from an ISV who
knows your particular domain/market/field cold is essential. There
are many non-HCP markets now which need significant compute power
that is accessible and usable by non HPC specialists and if MS can
line up the proper systems integrators, consultants and resellers who
can service the specialized markets then this could be pretty
successful.
My company has had a Rocketcalc system running MS Cluster Server 2003
in our colo cage for quite some time now, the feedback from the
individual actively using it has been very positive. Regardless of
what happens it will be an interesting thing to watch.
Regards,
Chris
On Jan 17, 2007, at 1:20 PM, David Mathog wrote:
Mikael Fredriksson wrote
This article: "SGI to offer Windows on clusters" might be worth
reading...
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?
command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9007859&source=NLT_PM&nlid=8
Any comments?
Seems like it's going to cost $$$ in extra work to keep a cluster like
that running.
For starters it would need to have the equivalent of a Windows site
license on the cluster, or it would be pure hell to activate, image,
and so forth. Security patches are also going to be interesting,
since the target market is Windows servers talking to Windows clients
one can't just firewall off the cluster and ignore it. But do you
really want your production cluster running automatic updates? I
think not! There's also the general issues of managing so
many machines. I guess you could set up sshd on them and run
a lot of scripts, but historically I've always found that there's some
damn piece of Windows that's only accessible through a GUI, and
who wants to point and click a hundred times, once per node, to do the
same thing on every node? Finally there's the basic question of:
"how is this a cluster"? Sure you can have N nodes splitting a load
under windows, typically by just shunting jobs around at the network
level, but in terms of working together as even a loosely coupled
whole how is that implemented? Especially if the nodes are just
running
off the shelf, single node type software.
For these reasons I suspect that running a big cluster of windows
machines isn't going to be an option unless there's a whole lot of
magic rolled into "Windows Compute Cluster". And if they can roll
in that much magic they really should target that software
differently,
as "Windows Multiple Workstation/Server Management Console". That is
a tool I'd like to have now, not for clusters, but for groups of
workstations, which invariably all need the same software installs
and/or tweaks but which would take hours to reimage.
Regards,
David Mathog
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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