Microsoft earnestly tried to enter the space with a deployment system, a job scheduler and an MPI implementation. Licenses were quite cheap and they were pushing hard with free consulting and support, but it did not stick.
Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.
I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.
But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.
Windows is a per-user GUI… supercomputing is all about crunching numbers, isn’t it?
I can understand M$ trying to get into this market and I know Windows server can be used to run stuff, but again, you don’t need a GUI on each node a supercomputer they’d be better off with DOS…?
No there was HPC sku of Windows 2003 and 2008 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Windows_Compute_Cluster_Server
Microsoft earnestly tried to enter the space with a deployment system, a job scheduler and an MPI implementation. Licenses were quite cheap and they were pushing hard with free consulting and support, but it did not stick.
Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.
I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.
But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.
But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?
Windows is a per-user GUI… supercomputing is all about crunching numbers, isn’t it?
I can understand M$ trying to get into this market and I know Windows server can be used to run stuff, but again, you don’t need a GUI on each node a supercomputer they’d be better off with DOS…?
I could see the NT kernel being okay in isolation, but the rest of Windows coming along for the ride puts the kibosh on that idea.