[Beowulf] SGI to offer Windows on clusters

[Rich Altmaier]

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