[Beowulf] MS Cray

[Eric Thibodeau]

Lux, James P wrote:
>>>> I suspect Microsoft has been listening here.  I also suspect this
>>>> machine will do ok in the business world, but somehow I
>>>>         
>> doubt they're
>>     
>>>> gonna see significant headway in a lot of the scientific
>>>>         
>> arenas.
>>     
>
> Of course MS is on the list.  Why not?  Look back through the archives when CCS was being discussed. And if MS wants to develop products to address some specific market niche, more power to them.
>   
Not that this was one of my comments, the MS dude never hid, he actually 
posted explicit questions regarding how MS should approach the 
clustering community ;)

On that node, here are my questions to the MS implementation of 
clustering (and how CX1 will actually be usable or how one will be able 
to develop _for_ execution on one of the MS based CX1):

Currently, most of our users are under Linux on their WS so that they 
can develop something that will potentially run off a big cluster. This 
implies the users are under a POSIX compliant OS with good 
MPI/OpenMP/threading support, which waters down to Linux or OSX (those 
Power Macs are impressive and *silent*).

Where I have reserves about the MS solution is as follows: how will MS 
users be able to develop parallel code locally on their WS without 
needing to upgrade/change their hardware/OS to be compatible with a MS 
based cluster/CX1. It's not made clear weather the "clustering tools" 
are tightly integrated into the CX1 platform or if, as with Linux or 
OSX, it's a simple case of installing mpi-ish libs (and a few others).

With the pricing scheme, I can't imagine _every_ dev getting their own 
CX1 to play on so I believe adoption of the platform required ease of 
installation (ie: all tools should be available throughout windows 
2000-xp-vista) and shouldn't even be version specific (IMHO)...but 
that's me being used to Linux heh! ;)

Eric
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