[Beowulf] How Can Microsoft's HPC Server Succeed?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:59:19PM +0200, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> The reasons
> for using Windows were more or less the same that have been mentioned 
> in this thread, so I won't repeat them. To note is that they weren't 
> using Windows exclusively, but only on a part of the cluster, the rest 
> running Linux.

Well, in that case the part of the argument that goes "You don't have
any Linux admins in your organization" doesn't apply. But I could see
the seductive line "You have a lot of faculty who are exclusively
Windows, how will they use your Linux cluster?" used.

BTW, isn't it still the case the Microsoft is exclusively using DAPL
for their MPI?  So yes, they do reduce performance on all high speed
interconnects.

> And then 
> things turned really strange after a statement saying that in Linux it 
> takes several minutes to start a parallel job while in Windows only 
> about 10 seconds.

I posted a link to a blog posting from Microsoft about that. It's
pretty terrible marketing for anyone who knows someone with a Linux
cluster, because few Linux clusters are misconfigured that badly.

-- greg