[Beowulf] Microsoft is coming to get ya

[Bill Rankin]

On Oct 20, 2005, at 1:34 PM, Jim Lux wrote:

>
> So.. my take on this, with respect to clusters, is that MS will  
> notionally provide a capability (Yeah, we got that covered), but I  
> don't know that you'll see much WinCluster specific software in the  
> next couple years.  MS' bread and butter is High availability  
> server farm kinds of things: massive arrays running SQLServer or  
> IIS or some whiz-bang web-services enabling backend, for instance.

As always, Microsoft will essentially redefine the term "cluster  
computing" in all their marketing verbage to mean exactly what they  
want it to mean (ie. whatever it is that their product actually does  
at the time).  It will probably bear little resemblance to Beowulf  
style clustering, although by the end of the year they will claim to  
dominate "cluster computing".

Most likely I see them trying to make their mark in the world o "Grid  
Computing" (a term that is already so nebulous these days that it  
defies exact definition), but in the end just re-inventing web- 
services and claiming it as their own revolutionary vision.

I am actually looking forward to Bill G.'s keynote at SC'05 next month.

-b


bill rankin, ph.d. ........ director, cluster and grid technology group
wrankin at ee.duke.edu .......................... center for computational
duke university ...................... science engineering and medicine
http://www.ee.duke.edu/~wrankin .............. http://www.csem.duke.edu