Why not NT clusters? Need arguments.

[Michael Stein]

> application.  I personally would not like to develop a parallel
> application on an NT cluster because all my favorite tools are missing
> and all the tools available cost a lot of money and are highly
> nonstandard (unless you view MS's efforts in code development software
> "standard").

NT costs more.  There is the obvious issue of hardware and software costs
and the extra complexity of dealing with this.  And dealing with the
software licenses.  

Beyond that are the real problems: The missing tools and environment
that suck up staff time.  Time spent pushing around a mouse; or rebooting
during NT installs.

I tried to build a small NT cluster back when we were going to try both
NT and Linux.  NT was an administrative pain since it assumes you are
sitting in front of THE keyboard/video/mouse.  I have very few problems
running Linux machines remotely over the net, this wasn't true with NT.

This is a bit old but see:

http://www.ats.ucla.edu/at/clustering/default.htm

There are undoubtly things which could be done to make NT less effort
to install/administer.  And possibly (?) things which can make it forget
it's really a one user system.  Anyone know how to get it to permanently
stop popping up a yes/no box on a compute node and waiting for a reply?.
How about a way to run two jobs on a single node when they both want a
different home directory at u:?

There's at lot less to build with Linux.  And if what you want almost
exists (as something else) you usually have the source and can modify
it to do what you want.

         ----- (seen on the net) -----
#  Windows NT indeed has very low Total Cost of Ownership. Trouble is,
#  Microsoft _owns_ Windows NT. You just licensed it.