[Beowulf] MS HPC... pricing...

[Lombard, David N]

From: Jim Lux on Monday, June 12, 2006 11:11 AM
> 
> There you go.. you have products from Ansys (Lots of design and Finite
> element stuff) which are hideously compute intensive, run in the
Windows
> environment (because it has to, the engineer also runs MS Office for
> institutional compatibility) and could really benefit from an
"attached
> cluster appliance" to make things go reasonably fast.

If you recall Gates' SCO5 keynote, that's what was shown.  The
presentation was very much about "compute resource as appliance" with
little to no attention paid to the cluster per se--it was much more
about what you do with the data in your Windows world.

> Note well that Ansys (and others) generally support multiple platforms
> (including Linux) but WCC gives them the ability to sell their (pretty
> expensive) product into an "all-windows" environment, which, in some
> institutions, is a good thing.

On the money, literally ;)  As someone pointed out, while CCS may likely
be of marginal interest to this list, there's lot of interest in
industry.

Joe Landman is quite correct that you can do well by presenting a Linux
cluster with a web-based interface and SMB-based storage.  But, let's
face it, those who respond to that pitch will respond all the more to
the full Windows gig.

--
David N. Lombard

My statements represent my opinions, not those of Intel Corporation