From: "Peter St. John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote > The ad is http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/default.mspx?R=cf > > The testamonials all seem to be equivalent to "I"m a PhD in Rocket Science > but setting up a Linux Cluster is too complex, so using MS saves me time to > do Rocket Science".
That's the way it sort of looks on the surface, but read a little deeper and it comes out differently. For instance, follow the link to the Virginia Polytechnic case study http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/facts/casestudies/vti.mspx and it says "Using desktop PCs, graduate students at the Computational Bioinformatics and Bioimaging Laboratory (CBIL) didnt have enough computing power to run complex data and statistical analysis programs quickly." Which to me means " they are probably running matlab on Windows and may not know anything else". Sure enough, dig around with google a bit and one finds this: http://www.ari.vt.edu/about_ARIHPCC.html where Matlab is the first application listed. Matlab is available for linux too, but ESP is not required to guess what happened: 1. Matlab too slow for some analysis on desktop Windows. 2. Users beg for more power. 3. Wow, we can do this on a windows cluster, then our Windows administrator won't need to learn anything new. 4. Buy a windows cluster. and possibly... 5. Oooh, did Microsoft just offer to subsidize this, even better! Can't say if the last one happened or not. Also couldn't find anything on their site indicating they ever tried a linux cluster instead. Note also the meeting where they presented their results... There's nothing wrong with using a Microsoft cluster to expand the power of an existing Windows application if that's a lot less work than porting it to linux. However, the case study would have been a lot more convincing had there been any info that showed a valid comparison for cost or speed between the Microsoft cluster and a linux cluster running on the same hardware. Regards, David Mathog [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
