Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Hits Second Beta

[Marcus Yam]

Could Windows do battle with Linux in the high performance category, and win?

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Hits Second Beta : Read more

 

[ivan_chess]

Sounds interesting but HPC OSs need to be really small. Compute nodes don't have hard drives so the OS must be sent over the network and stored entirely in the RAM. Feature filled Windows won't be small.

 

[p05esto]

You have to give it to MS, they are really turnign up the heat the past few years. They were a little stale and comfortable, someone woke the sleeping giant.

 

[Shadow703793]

Could Windows do battle with Linux in the high performance category, and win?

Short answer: Nope

Linux currently dominates the HPC/Supercomputing market

 

[rbarone69]

[citation][nom]ivan_chess[/nom]Sounds interesting but HPC OSs need to be really small.[/citation]

To start I have to disclaim that I currently harness one of man's greatest known reserves of HPC ignorance...

MS has done a pretty good job on the Server 2008 series to strip it down to a very small featureless footprint. I'd bet they have taken this a step further for this particular application.

 

[thegreathuntingdolphin]

This is cool and all. However, I want my Windows Home Server 2!!!

 

[ivan_chess]

[citation][nom]rbarone69[/nom]To start I have to disclaim that I currently harness one of man's greatest known reserves of HPC ignorance...MS has done a pretty good job on the Server 2008 series to strip it down to a very small featureless footprint. I'd bet they have taken this a step further for this particular application.[/citation]

There are some resources out there, here are some undergrad projects that cover the basics of HPC:

http://institutes.lanl.gov/isti/summer-school/cluster-student-projects/

 

[palladin9479]

Well depending how their running this thing, it might not be a server "OS" in the typical notion. Now I don't work on this, but typically HPC's have "controller" node's and slave nodes with the controller nodes having some form of storage and feeding the slave nodes their boot code / data / jobs. You could do the same thing here, load the MS Server OS on a controller node, then remote boot all the data nodes from the controller node, feeding them only a minimal OS. Try not to think of each node having a full MS Windows with gui / driver infrastructure, only a small kernel.

I'm liking the idea about integrating with Windows 7 to use spare client CPU cycles. When you start to look at typical offices, imagine 100 client's giving space cycles during the night or even during the regular day.

 

[MrKKBB]

[citation][nom]ivan_chess[/nom]Sounds interesting but HPC OSs need to be really small. Compute nodes don't have hard drives so the OS must be sent over the network and stored entirely in the RAM. Feature filled Windows won't be small.[/citation]

Really? Most of the clusters I have worked with do have their own local drive. The one thing I always wondered about is the price. A $200/node OS is a lot more than the free Rocks using CentOS, especially when you have a 1000 nodes!

 

[ivan_chess]

[citation][nom]MrKKBB[/nom]Really? Most of the clusters I have worked with do have their own local drive. The one thing I always wondered about is the price. A $200/node OS is a lot more than the free Rocks using CentOS, especially when you have a 1000 nodes![/citation]

Large clusters would have a hard drive failing every 5 minutes. Check out my link to the LANL summer institutes above for more details on diskless nodes and management. We used CentOS too and you can push that out to nodes without disks (after removing unnecessary features). Storage arrays are more expensive but they are more failure tolerant than the cluster. You lose money when your cluster goes down so the storage array is cheaper in the long run.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Sounds like MS is making an effort to catch up.

 

[randomizer]

Short answer: Nope

Linux currently dominates the HPC/Supercomputing market

It would be like asking if Linux is going to do battle with Windows in the home desktop market. Both OSs dominate their respective markets by such a large margin that they are unlikely to be shaken any time soon. And let's not forget those licencing fees with Windows HPC that Linux doesn't have (ignoring commercial support costs if the company went with that option).

From the article:

Interoperability options. We’ve heard from customers that “rip and replace” isn’t often a viable option for building out their clusters.

I hope they didn't spend much money researching this blatantly obvious fact.