/. MS vs. university Beowulfs

[Eugene Leitl]

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/21/0522242&mode=thread&tid=109

Posted by Cliff on Thursday February 21, @12:30PM

from the please...no-more-beowulf-jokes dept.

cascadefx asks: "I work for a mid-sized mid-western university. One of our
departments has started up a small Beowulf cluster research project that
he hopes to grow over time. At the moment, the thing is incredibly weak...
but it is running on old hardware and is basically used for dog and pony
shows to get more funding and hopefully donations of higher-end systems.
It runs Linux and works, it is just not anything to write home about.
Here's the problem: my understanding is that an MS rep asked what it would
take to get them to switch to a Microsoft cluster. Is this possible? Are
there MS clusters that do what Beowulf clusters are capable of? I thought
MS clusters were for load balancing, not computation... which is the
hoped-for goal of this project. Can the Slashdot crowd offer some advice?
If there are MS clusters, comparisons of the capabilities would be
welcome." One has to only go as far as Microsoft's site to see its current
attempt at clustering, but what is the real story. Have any of you had a
chance to pit a Linux Beowulf cluster against one from Microsoft? How did
they compare?