[Beowulf] MS Cray

[Eric Thibodeau]

John Vert wrote:
>
> Eric,
>
>  
>
> I don’t have a CX1 (yet!) but I expect the development experience will 
> be the usual Windows HPC model. Design/code/test parallel code in 
> Visual Studio then do test runs on the cluster. With Visual C++ and 
> Windows HPC, you have MPI, OpenMP, threading, and an MPI debugger. You 
> can debug and test your code either locally or on a cluster from the 
> same development environment.
>
>  
>
> If you are interested, Pluralsight has a very detailed tutorial here: 
> http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/drjoe/archive/2008/06/19/51178.aspx
>
>  
>
> It is definitely our goal to make it simple to develop an MPI 
> application on your desktop and then easily run it, tune it, debug it 
> on a cluster of any size.
>
>  
>
> John Vert
>
> Windows HPC
>
Yes but...that brings out my point, this is implying that _everyone_ 
would need HPC server. And seeing how much that costs for the CX1, I'm 
curious to see how the research departments will be able to cope with 
the licensing issues and TCO of using the MS solution compared to the 
FOSS and/or POSIX proprietary approach. There is also a question of 
readily available resources that will be able to run the code MS 
flavored code, there are many MPI+posix clusters out there, none that I 
know of that run MS HPC.
>
>  
>
> *From:* beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org 
> [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] *On Behalf Of *Eric Thibodeau
> *Sent:* Wednesday, September 17, 2008 1:28 PM
> *To:* Lux, James P
> *Cc:* Beowulf
> *Subject:* Re: [Beowulf] MS Cray
>
>  
>
> 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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