On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Geoff Galitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> .... > > More to the point of the thread: if we are talking about MS making > greater > inroads into the HPC market, then their most likely tactic is to convince > the commercial app vendors to write and/or port their apps to the Windows > platform. I've seen a number of animation and visualization apps running > on > MS clusters. They do exist and this is their best near-term chance of > making those inroads. ...... > .... > > I've been doing clusters for approx 10 years, but like others I am now > running Windows on my main workstation because it is the right combination > of development environment, application availability and usability for me. > Prior to Vista, this would not have been the case... so life and > technology > do evolve. > My company is primarily a Linux / HPC shop. However, we have some contacts with MS and have done a couple of WCCS installations. When a vanilla Linux+SGE+xcat or ROCKS cluster (say from a CentOS disk) is compared against WCCS, Linux is unbeatable: Price vs Features+Performance. Just use the license fee payable to MS to pay to a service provider and get 100% warm body support. I heard MS telling that they are not really out to get the National Labs kind of computing. They are more focussed on, atleast right now in this region (ASEAN) , smallish (4-16 nodes) clusters running vendor certified stack such as Fluent, Digital Rendering, calculations with an Excel UI etc. The strengths they extol is what you would suspect: AD integration, one click job launches from your desktop, seamless file drag-and-drop, Office integration (for the PHBs to check off ) , No relearning since it looks and acts like a Windows machine (which is only partly true). While I usually don't like the hairball that is MS software, MS has actually put some effort and made a well integrated software (not bad for v1, WCCS /2003). They bundle remote installation, optional local AD (on headnode), IB is fully supported, a job scheduler that can be used via CLI, Win32 GUI and via Webservices (potentially, Linux, & OSX can use this interface). The whole thing is supported (of course, you pay for it). Having said that, I think that the Linux clustering scene needs a little competition, especially the for-fee ones. Apart from SDSC, not many innovations are happening. I am not referring to standalone projects, where FOSS community has a lot of innovatio happening, but rather one integrated Linux Cluster on a DVD that gets you a cluster ready in 20mins, with no pain at all. ROCKS comes with its own problems, esp, wrt updates (which is why I stopped using ROCKS), however they are working on this one, AFAIK. Have a look at what RH and Novell offer as "cluster license". I will pick on RH since that is what I am using for clustering: It is just a RHEL ES, plus RHEL WS licenses. No extra clustering stuff are packaged (eg: SGE, Ganglia) nor are there any extra toolkits for managing the cluster ( reinstall, status, cluster wide command execution, queue management etc). If I install SGE on a RHEL cluster, RH is not going to support any problems with SGE. For an admin who buys such a package, especially if (s)he is unfamiliar with Linux, it is going to be a nightmare. So, here's what the FOSS community, especially, vendors (RH, Novell) should be doing, specifically for a HPC oriented version: - remove all unwanted packaged (desktop software, multimedia, web browsers etc) - package SGE, Ganglia, - a good clustering toolkit, maybe derived from ROCKS scripts (I am biased towards IBM xcat, because that is the only tool I use) - LDAP as the default auth source, setup SSH for clusterwide passwordless logins by default - easy integration to AD - provide default environments , SGE queues etc) or easy to use scripts/gui - Many users have low-complexity jobscripts. Provide a web UI (jetspeed2, tomcat ?). Let the advanced users tap the power of command line. - package a selection of top20 FLOSS science apps (Gromacs, Phylip, Blast, MPICH, fasta, fftw etc) - package and provide one click installation for restricted-ware such as NAMD, or commercial software such as Intel Compilers, Fluent, Amber etc. It CAN be done, Ubuntu has demonstrated how to do it well. - package and provide easy install of a parallel filesystem such as GFS or Lustre My $0.02 + 7% Taxes Regards Anand > > Just my two cents. > > -geoff > > >
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