Microsoft gains technical-computing toehold

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But when it comes to the Linux-dominated cluster market, though, familiarity with Microsoft can be a burden as well as an asset.

For example, SGI, a high-performance computing specialist with ties to Linux, got a frosty reception on a compute cluster mailing list when it announced support for Windows CCS earlier this year.

"I don't hate Microsoft," said Robert Brown, a professor and compute cluster expert in Duke University's physics department, in a posting to the mailing list. "If anything, I fear it...Microsoft is for all practical purposes completely unregulated, it faces no serious competition, it routinely engages in business practices that make it very difficult for serious competition to ever arise, and it extends all over the world, not just in the United States."

When it comes to HPC, Windows is not the incumbent. "The HPC community has been Unix- and Linux-based for decades," said Gartner analyst Carl Claunch. "The university environments in which most have trained are heavily Linux-centric. The domination of Linux in HPC and in clusters is quite strong."

Among technical advantages of Linux clusters is better maturity, better software choices, broader abilities and a proven ability to run at large scale, Claunch said.

New features
Windows CCS isn't Microsoft's last crack at the market, though. It just released Service Pack 1, which is based on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. That new version makes it possible to bring up a cluster in one fell swoop rather than installing software on each machine individually.

More significant changes will come with CCS version 2, Hansen said, which will be based on the "Longhorn Server" successor to Windows Server 2003. Longhorn Server is due to ship this year, but Hansen declined to say when the CCS revamp will emerge.

Version 2 will feature "simplified development, deployment, operation and integration," Hansen said. Specific improvements will help networking--in particular TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) software and support for larger networks, he said.

For development, Microsoft touts its Visual Studio programming tools. Version 2 will feature better support for software that executes in parallel on a number of machines, he said. Building that parallelism into software is a decades-old challenge in the computer industry.

Microsoft also has struck partnerships with IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and SGI to make it easier for customers to purchase clusters with software already set up. SGI likes having Windows CCS as an option for customers working on animation, for example. "There are a lot of shops that run a lot of Windows applications," and they can use a Windows cluster to speed up work, said Louise Ledeen, a manager for digital content management marketing at SGI.

And even in a market with cultural barriers, pragmatism can win the day. That was the case for Matt Wortman, director of computational biology and information technology at the University of Cincinnati's Genome Research Institute. His group already has Linux clusters, but picked Windows CCS for a 14-node cluster that runs simulation software to analyze drugs' molecular behavior. It integrated easily with researchers' computers, 95 percent of which run Windows, he said.

"I don't care if it's Microsoft or Scyld, (Linux cluster software from Penguin Computing)," Wortman said. "I want to make it easier for the average biologist to find new drugs."

[Jesus#2]

Spam Zombie Clusters!

Great!

[donsolaris]

Nice...another immature post.*

NM

[AlienEric]

Windows

Their entry into Windows mobile has created some fears into other companies such as Palm. Some of the users have started adopted the windows mobile and shared their stuff at http://www.mobdown.com/ including patches so it's just amazing what MS could do when it enters a market, it just creates a whole range of stuff when it wasn't there before.

[ckurowic]

Morons and paid forum posters...

I can't believe you just said that. Everyone knows microsoft
squashes innovation and they always have. This sounds to me like
another paid forum post by MS....APPLE, INC. creates amazing stuff
in preexisting markets, and they always have. Get a clue.

[Penguinisto]

Err, not exactly...

Nokia and Symbian have been sharing stuff long before MSFT made an entry into the mobile market, ne?

/P

[Solarion]

It'd be funny if it weren't so formulaic

1) Microsoft wants a toehold in some new market
2) TIE IT TO WINDOWS!!
3) Market becomes theirs.

Over and over and over and over and over again.

You'll note that nothing in the article was about how great Windows CCS is. Rather, it's all based on the fact that:
1) People are already using Windows
2) People are already using Windows-only apps.

What a crock. Nobody can get a fair shake in the tech market anymore. Inevitibly, Microsoft clamps down on any perceived threat using the bully-club of Windows.

[rcrusoe]

There's probably a market for this.

I'm sure there is a market for Windows clusters and Microsoft will have some success in it.

There are lots of companies that don't need their systems available constantly and can afford the downtime that invariably comes when running Windows.

I know individuals that run 5 - 10 server Linux clusters. And it isn't unheard of for relatively small businesses (like Lowery Digital) to have fairly large (100 server) clusters.

So, IMO, writing about a few 5-20 server clusters as a Microsoft toehold appears a bit pathetic.

[qquidd]

Re. a lot of market actually

Actually not many companies have single large clusters (>= 64nodes).

In fact, what I have found during customer visits is departmental or small workgroup level clusters that only have 8,16,or 32 node clusters are much more frequent occurrence (ok, these are mostly engineering/scietific design groups - so my obsv may be biased).

For good or for bad, Microsoft has gained a tremendous amount of traction with these groups, particularly by pushing it as a low maintenance-easy to use solution. I don't think it will be long we will start seeing larger CCS clusters.

[markhahn]

premise is wrong

the premise of the article is that a cluster needs to run some flavor of windows to interop with other windows machines. happily, this is untrue, thanks to samba, openldap, etc. not to mention SOA approaches! in other words, claiming that the cluster needs to run the same OS as the client is admitting that windows is a closed, proprietary, rigid, fragile, non-agile system.

msft wouldn't take that losing spin - instead they claim their clusters are easier in some sense. this is mostly FUD, though, since there are numerous linux-based clusters which basically install with a single click. the windows world, however, doesn't really grasp how easy it can be, since SOP for windows is to have a monkey reinstall when a box has a problem. of course, there are lots of monkeys available, and pretty cheaply.

I'm a linux/clustering guy (duh) and am not too worried about CCS. mainly because it's a pre-SOA approach, but also because access to a 5-node cluster is not really interesting - it might as well be a 8 or 16-core single workstation. where clusters are interesting is when they get large and are shared by multiple groups. being able to burst to 2k processors is a major win, even if your "basal" consumption rate is 10p.

[qquidd]

premise...

Sure, 2K processors is interesting.
But how many 2K (or more) processor clusters are there in the world?

[Penguinisto]

Umm, this is news?

I remember when MSFT was doing their level best to break into the top 5 on the world's supercomputing lists ever since (at least) the year 2000 or so. (they manage to blip in and out a few times).

I mean seriously... it'll all happen the same way all of MSFT's other attempts at this niche:

* Once every couple of years, MSFT tweaks the unholy crap out of Windows, builds new 'uber clust0rz!' with it, manages to sell it to someone, and proclaims the product as top dog.

* said cluster manages to crawl into (maybe) the top 10 on credible supercomputer listings.

* IBM shows up a week later with something that blows the doors off of MSFT's best effort.

* rinse, repeat.

/P

[garrywdm]

it's good news

You sound worried that after repeated attempts, this time they've got it right, and that's news. Good news to some

[rapier1]

One small nit

Very very few machines last any considerable period of time in the
top positions on the Top 500 list. We'd get a machine into 2nd or
3rd place on the list and a couple of months later it would be 25th
or lower. Its just the nature of the industry. When you can boost a
linpack by just tossing on a few hundred more processors this sort
of thing is inevitable.

[chris_d]

Not even on my radar

I manage a research cluster at a major university. Microsoft's cluster products aren't even on my radar. I took one look and when I saw the price per node, that was enough for me. Microsoft wants so much money for this product, it would have doubled the cost of our 32-node cluster. So we could have 32 nodes running Linux, or 16 running Windows. What's more, we have several researchers running Linux, several more running Mac OS X, and a couple running Windows. How would this play in our mixed-platform environment? My guess is not too well. My experience is that Microsoft's products don't play well with non-Microsoft products.

I don't really understand what all the buzz about this product is. If someone is smart enough to be a grad student, can't he or she learn Linux? It's not that difficult. None of our grad students have had trouble with it. Most know Linux when they come in to the lab anyway. This really sounds like a good product for lackeys whose strategy for improving IT is to buy EVERYTHING from Microsoft, regardless of whether it's a good product.

We're using Rocks right now and it's working quite well for us. The installation process is very simple. I can rebuild the entire cluster with a new Rocks release in a couple of hours tops. Management is simple. It's easy to add users to the cluster and install software. It also doesn't require license keys, product activation, or have WGA. I can just imagine getting a call on my cell one night from someone whose job on the cluster failed 5 days in. Then I find out it's because WGA shut down Windows due to a validation error.

[FutureGuy]

this reminds me..

..of what people used to say when MS first entered the server market, humm things have changed quite a bit now. Its a matter of time before Windows runs a lot of clusters.