Sorry to divert a bit the thread towards its initial subject and away from the security issues currently discussed...
I've just seen a presentation from a University (which shall remain unnamed) which partnered with Microsoft for... well, HPC. The reasons for using Windows were more or less the same that have been mentioned in this thread, so I won't repeat them. To note is that they weren't using Windows exclusively, but only on a part of the cluster, the rest running Linux.
Towards the beginning of the presentation there was a mention of a MPI latency benchmark showing 2.something microseconds over their IB (unknown make and speed) in mainboards using latest generation Intel CPUs with Microsoft's MPI libs, which seemed like a decent performance and got me pretty excited. But then I changed my mind when I started to hear what a great feature it is to have several nodes booting and installing the OS in the same 50 minutes (yes, minutes!) that a single node takes, due to a wonderful feature called multicast. And then things turned really strange after a statement saying that in Linux it takes several minutes to start a parallel job while in Windows only about 10 seconds. Then I started wondering: were those 2.something microseconds a measure of the same latency that I know of ?
I can't say for sure that this was part of some Microsoft strategy and not a PR effort gone bad, but I'm strongly enclined towards the first which leads me to believe that the answer to the question in the subject is: by disinforming people. Yes, there are probably many CEOs of SMBs, who don't know/care much about technical details and don't have a clue about Linux HPC, who are going to be impressed by such statements. And when you can run HPL from Excel by modifying in a cell one of the parameters and getting the results back in that table, results from which you can quickly generate a graphic and say "whew, I should be in Top500", who can say that clustering is hard and user-unfriendly ?
I'm all for healthy competition in this area, especially as I think that HPC didn't evolve significantly in the past few years. But such aproaches are far from healthy... well, at least for my definition of healthy competition. ;-)
-- Bogdan Costescu IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany Phone: +49 6221 54 8869/8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8868/8850 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
