[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Ryan Waite]

Ideally ISVs won't link with a.DLL for Compute Cluster Server. Instead
they'll call a web service running on the job scheduler node. That web
service could be offered by a Windows cluster or a Linux/UNIX cluster.
This simplifies cluster integration work for ISVs.

We hope the way people do this is using the HPC Profile as defined by
OGF. The first release of this spec is pretty simple (read: pragmatic)
and in the future I hope it will become richer, providing better
application integration with cluster resources.

We've just hired Steven Newhouse (previously with OMII at Southampton)
to work with OGF and related standards on these kinds of issues. If
you're passionate about job scheduler interoperability or about ISV
integration with clusters I'd encourage you to join the HPC Profile
working group at OGF.

Thanks,
Ryan Waite
Group Program Manager - HPC
Microsoft Corporation

-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org]
On Behalf Of Rich Altmaier
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 8:59 AM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: [Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

Here is a proactive suggestion for keeping open source
ahead of Microsoft CCS:
1. I think CCS will appeal to small shops with no prior cluster
    and no admin capability beyond a part time windows person.
2. such customers are the volume seats for a range of desktop
    CAD/CAE tools.
3. Such ISVs will see potential of license growth, and will
    likely choose to tie-in to the Microsoft message of ease-of-use.
    A big feature here, in my view, is the one-button-job-launch.

This means, for Linux to have a position as the backend
compute cluster, we must have this one button job launch
capability.  A Windows library must be available to
the ISV, to provide a job submission API  to the batch
scheduler.  With such a feature, the ISVs can be
persued to incoporate.

Ideally the job submission API is a kind of standard, so
the ISV does not see duplicate work versus the batch scheduler
used.

So,
a) we need a job submission API, and
b) we need the Windows library added to Linux batch schedulers.
    (I'm not saying the scheduler runs on Windows, we just need
    the submission/retrieve portion).

Does such exist already?

Thanks, Rich
Rich Altmaier, SGI
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