Supercomputers to run Windows
Published: 25 May 2004 10:55 BST
"Another way for them to keep Windows sales moving is to roll out more of these editions," Helm said. "When you've got a product that you need to keep moving, one way to do it is to segment it. You introduce Tarter Control Windows Server and Sensitive Teeth Windows Server."
High-performance computing is a lucrative market, with sales that increased 14 percent to $5.3bn (£2.9bn) in 2003, according to IDC. And "bright clusters," Linux servers that manufacturers know will be used in a cluster, had sales of $384m in the fourth quarter.
Beating the incumbent
But for once, Microsoft is the newcomer, and Linux is the incumbent. Linux got its first foothold in academia and research labs, which already had expertise and software for the functionally similar Unix operating system.
"The majority of people doing high-performance computing are a lot more comfortable and efficient inside a Unix environment," a category that includes Linux, the SDSC's Papadopoulos said. To convince people to invest the time and money to switch, Microsoft will have to offer something much better, he said.
Linux, boosted by low-cost servers using processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, now is used on prestigious machines. Thunder, a machine at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with 512 Linux servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, can perform more than 19 trillion calculations per second, second only to Japan's Earth Simulator.
Dozens of machines in a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers run Linux, including five of the top 10. Only two on the list are identified as Windows machines.
One reason Windows has been slow to catch on is that Unix and Linux were bred to be administered remotely, which is a necessary feature for managing a cluster with dozens or hundreds of computers.
In Windows, "the notion of remote computing is significantly more difficult than in Unix," Papadopoulos said. "Because Windows was born out of the desktop, [it is] deeply ingrained in the Microsoft culture that you have somebody sitting in front of the machine to do work."
Management is on Microsoft's agenda, though. The company is hiring one programmer to work on a "graphical and script-based user interface for efficient job and resource management across large clusters" and another to create "automated infrastructure to uncover performance and reliability problems with high performance, large-scale server applications."
Linux adds another advantage: it's open-source software, meaning that anybody may see and modify its underlying source code. Most business customers aren't interested but high-performance technical computing users need to extract every bit of performance and track down difficult bugs.
"The nice thing is that because everything is open, if you have a problem, you can get at the root of the problem in terms of the software. That moves things along quite a bit faster," Papadopoulos said.
That openness also makes it easier to accommodate the multitude of different technologies used in the high-performance market but not necessarily in the mainstream computing market, said Brian Stevens, vice president of operating system development for Linux seller Red Hat.
Releasing a product
Microsoft declined to share schedule information about the HPC Edition, but work is already under way.
For example, a software developer kit for HPC Edition will include support for the Message Passing Interface, or MPI, widely used software to let computers in a cluster communicate with one another.
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