MS is one of the companies who have stated that ...

Post #156,785 by dmarker 5/24/04 11:34:24 PM Reply	MS is one of the companies who have stated that ... they will GRID enable all their software esp Windows. Such a move by them is consistent in that area but I wouldn't give them a snowball's agaist Linux in a supercomputer contest :-) Cheers Doug _________________________________________________________ "Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!". -- Leonardo Da Vinci
Post #156,817 by jbrabeck 5/25/04 6:53:58 AM Reply	Depends upon the contest. The only contest MS wins is in marketshare. Throw lots of money at the market. Market a product that is "good enough". FUD, FUD, FUD and more money === market share. MS wins. Performance? Do they care?
Post #156,854 by folkert 5/25/04 11:53:45 AM Reply	Actually... in a word: YES. Scientists are nearly always under the gun to get the work processed as fast as realistically possible. That means... none of the foo-foo GUI crap. Diskless booting with 2GB of RAM and Dual Processors etc... is the ticket. In that arena... MS lost abut 1991 with the introduction of Win 3.11 which would not do that. With the extensions that made it network friendly... bwahahah Embedded Windows won't ever cut it. What, you say Tablet Windows? nope. anything else is to huge. -- [link\|mailto:greg@gregfolkert.net\|greg], [link\|http://www.iwethey.org/ed_curry\|REMEMBER ED CURRY!] @ *i_wethey* Give a man a match, he'll be warm for a minute. Set him on fire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life!
Post #156,858 by jbrabeck 5/25/04 12:05:36 PM Reply	I was referring to MS with "do they care" But your point is a given with the super computer industry.
Post #156,864 by Another Scott 5/25/04 12:14:48 PM Reply	I dunno. If they really want that market, they can make a half-hearted effort at a BSD-like package with some MS-specific extensions to court scientific developers. They did buy DEC's FORTRAN and market it as "Powerstation" or some such for a while, IIRC. But I think the supercomputer market is too small for MS to worry about other than for bragging rights. They're probably more interested in FUDding the open OSes. Maybe they'll do an internal project, release some press food about their super results for their "forthcoming" super product, then let it drag out ... I dunno. But they can seemingly call (almost) anything they like Windows even if it's not. Cheers, Scott.
Post #156,990 by slugbug 5/25/04 10:14:53 PM Reply	RE: I dunno... ...well, if you 'owned' the desktop and could 'harvest' processing power across other desktops in the organization to make 'folks' more productive, you might take a shot at that. Or, perhaps you want to make workgroup server backups faster? What about batch processing speed ups? Or, building data marts/data warehouses on the fly? Surely, there is a reason for the interest in this area, no? Cheers, Slugbug
Post #156,992 by Another Scott 5/25/04 10:53:49 PM Reply	Good points. I was thinking about the 1st part, not the 2nd From admin's post: In a recent interview, Bob Muglia, a Microsoft senior vice president who leads the development of Windows Server, said the company is interested in two particular areas: building high-performance computing clusters and harvesting the unused processing power of PCs. I can see why they'd be interested in harvesting ("WinServer 2008 - Now 5.3% faster using Microsoft's patented Innovation Harvesting Experience ®"), but moving into supercomputer/HP computing clusters seems to be much more of a stretch for them. With the way hardware has evolved over the last 20 years they would be foolish not to keep an eye on such developments (today's supercomputer is tomorrow's scrap on eBay). Good points as always. Thanks. Cheers, Scott.

Welcome to IWETHEY!