Are we going mainstream?

[Greg Lindahl]

> I fear the day when my supervisor says he prefers the "Microsoft
clustering
> solution" over anything the Beowulf movement has produced.

I don't fear that at all, yet. Microsoft is only interested in what I call
"Capital C" clusters, not "little c" clusters. Microsoft clusters for high
availability, mostly, and a little bit for high capacity. You won't find
mention of parallel programs in any Microsoft clustering literature. You
won't find Microsoft imagining clusters with 2,000 nodes.

The reason Microsoft does that is that they aim only at the biggest market,
business apps. They don't care about high performance computing, no matter
what Todd Needham does.

I think the best proof that we're mainstream is that we're imitating the #1
supercomputer vendor, IBM. They already sold the market on what we're doing.
We're just cheaper, faster, more flexible, ...

-- g