[Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Peter St. John]

Amjad,

MS WIn3.11 was a GUI application on top of a small, reliable OS (DOS). Since
then, however, MS has integrated the OS with the GUI, which is awkward for
developing interprocess communication and booting light kernels. Since XP,
there is further integration of the OS with licencing and security material,
which can't be stripped off without comprimising some big MS concerns.
Basically, Unix was designed to be a development environment; VMS was
designed for safe and efficient DP; MS was designed for marketing (and
arguably, an easier end-user experience). The main reason I know of to use
MS for a server is to commoditize MS-certified admins, who are cheaper than
RGB is. Even IBM uses a zillion instances of Linux over VMWare on a 390 to
make a web farm.

I'd be interested in a benchmark comparison of MS cluster vs linux cluster,
but I pause at wondering who would bother. Of course I'd merely expect that
the OS would be too big to make sense on a compute node; I'm told that Vista
has an efficient kernel, but if MS stripped off the layers people would just
make 1-node "clusters" to get around the licensing material, which would be
counterproductive to MS. But suppose someone wanted to do a test to find out
(instead of merely assuming). If the result came out well for MS, I'd want
to be paid by MS; they exist for marketing, they are richer than Croesus, it
would be foolish to do anything for them for free. But that would impugn
objectivity. And if the result were poor for MS, nobody would care because
that's our expectations (pardon me for speaking for others). So I just don't
see that anyone at all is motivated to do an objective comparison.

But I'd be very interested anyway in an honest attempt, if you hear of one.

Salaam,
Peter


On 4/1/07, amjad ali <amjad11 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Would any of you please like to share usage-experience/views/comments
> about Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 based Beowulf Clusters?
>
> What in your opinion is the future of such clusters?
>
> How you compare these with the LINUX CLUSTERS?
>
> regards.
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