[Beowulf] Re: MS Cray

[Eric Thibodeau]

David Mathog wrote:
> Getting back to the original subject, what would this Cray box "look
> like" when it is running windows?  Does it show up as one desktop for
> everything (basically an SMP machine), one desktop per blade, one per
> processor(or core), or even virtualized, with more than one desktop per
> core?  In terms of administering the box the first of these would be by
> far the easiest to deal with, since there would only be the one copy of
> Windows present.
>   
I seriously doubt that MS is presenting the entire system as a huge SMP. 
If it's the case, I'd stay away from it since it implies that either you 
have to use a proprietary API to get performance (inter-core 
communications à la MPI) or that the model is OpenMosix ish...which IMHO 
is a nice theory, horrible practice model. My impression/technical view 
of it is that the system most probably runs off a "master" board with 
slave boards which boot using a network image (pretty much like NFS 
roots). It is the most logical approach, again, IMHO (single point of 
management and all)
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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