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July 20, 2007
Windows CCS and the End of *nix in HPC
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There is an article over at SearchDataCenter.com on Windows CCS adoption and trends in the HPC industry. The article is useful as an overview of who's adopting CCS and what they're doing with it.
The article plays up the apparent conflict between the adoption of CCS by users and vendors and the Windows HPC naysayers, primarily large scale HPC users from the scientific side of HPC.
As an example of the pro-Windows CCS point of view:
Professor Saifur Rahman of the Advanced Research Institute at Virginia Tech in Arlington, Va., uses Windows on the institute's HPC cluster to run and analyze medical data.
...Rahman chose Windows rather than traditional Linux because students are familiar with Microsoft software.
And the con-Windows view:
Don Becker -- who is the founder and chief technical officer of Scyld Software and the co-founder of the original Beowulf project, which is the cornerstone of commodity-based, high-performance cluster computing -- was surprised to hear such positive feedback about Windows on clusters.
...the idea of using Windows in the HPC space is outlandish to Becker, who believes that Linux is the ideal operating system for clusters; the OS, he said, "grew up in that space and has good high-performance communications."
Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager of open source business solutions for Unisys, had a reasonable and (to my mind) correct point of view:
Page: 1 of 2"Windows environments are widely used by clients, so from our perspective, moving users off Windows on to Linux isn't always the best choice," Gold said. "Conversely, there are many people in the Unix space who will never move off Linux; it's like a religion for them, and they won't change."
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