[Beowulf] Re: Redmond is at it, again

[Leif Nixon]

"Douglas O'Flaherty" <douglas at shore.net> writes:

> When Cornell deployed the Windows clusters back a few years, the
> typical cluster developer grumbled some. The surprise was how many new
> users asked to be on the Windows clusters. Many were not from the hard
> sciences, but from economics and other departments who needed to do
> numerical analysis.

We've seen a similar phenomenon in moving from UNICOS to Linux
clusters; users appreciate being able to run the same code on both
their laptop and on our big machines. (Yeah, yeah, this isn't always
possible in general - your code might need a high performance cluster
to run in any worthwhile manner - but when it *is* possible, it is
nice.)

I'll have to admit, grudgingly, that this may be applicable in the
Windows user/Windows cluster case as well.

-- 
Leif Nixon                                    Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre           Linkoping University
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