Lux, James P wrote:
I suspect Microsoft has been listening here. I also suspect this
machine will do ok in the business world, but somehow I
doubt they're
gonna see significant headway in a lot of the scientific
arenas.
Of course MS is on the list. Why not? Look back through the archives when CCS
was being discussed. And if MS wants to develop products to address some
specific market niche, more power to them.
Not that this was one of my comments, the MS dude never hid, he actually
posted explicit questions regarding how MS should approach the
clustering community ;)
On that node, here are my questions to the MS implementation of
clustering (and how CX1 will actually be usable or how one will be able
to develop _for_ execution on one of the MS based CX1):
Currently, most of our users are under Linux on their WS so that they
can develop something that will potentially run off a big cluster. This
implies the users are under a POSIX compliant OS with good
MPI/OpenMP/threading support, which waters down to Linux or OSX (those
Power Macs are impressive and *silent*).
Where I have reserves about the MS solution is as follows: how will MS
users be able to develop parallel code locally on their WS without
needing to upgrade/change their hardware/OS to be compatible with a MS
based cluster/CX1. It's not made clear weather the "clustering tools"
are tightly integrated into the CX1 platform or if, as with Linux or
OSX, it's a simple case of installing mpi-ish libs (and a few others).
With the pricing scheme, I can't imagine _every_ dev getting their own
CX1 to play on so I believe adoption of the platform required ease of
installation (ie: all tools should be available throughout windows
2000-xp-vista) and shouldn't even be version specific (IMHO)...but
that's me being used to Linux heh! ;)
Eric
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