[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Jim Lux]

At 01:39 PM 1/19/2007, Geoff Jacobs wrote:
>R



> > scheduler, management package, and MPI stack for < $500.
>What about compilers?

Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition of VC++, VC#, VB, etc are free for 
the downloading.  They all include command line compiler/linker tools and make.

Not a straight across port from, e.g. gcc, but not bad, especially 
for console (non GUI) apps.

And, given that this product is aimed at folks who are already 
Windows developers, I would assume they use their existing 
tools.  The MPI stack is accessed (at least as of last summer) by 
what are essentially OS calls (P/Invoke).. It would be way cool if 
Ryan, et al., were to actually make a namespace, function calls, etc. 
so you didn't have to do the P/Invoke thing.

(I've been burned more than once trying to get things like Serial 
Comm working with P/Invoke in a multithreaded process... For me, the 
HUGE advantage of VS2005 was that I hopefully will never have to use 
P/Invoke again)