Why HPC Windows is not selected

Test Time: answer the following question: Which of the following operating systems is the most efficient and reliable high-end computing system in your enterprise? 1) Linux, 2) solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?

Okay. The answer is over. If your answer is Linux, you get a very high score. If you select Solaris, you get 9 points. If you select OpenVMS, you get 8 points. If you choose Windows, after hearing what everyone said, "Are you sure your PC is powered on?" See.

Microsoft has never paid much attention to high-performance computing systems for decades, but wants to enter the high-performance computing system market with the high-performance computing system Server 2008 listed. Do you think this is possible? Yes, Microsoft has released Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. After a long investigation, I finally found a user of this product. He told me, "for a production system, there are too many upgrades to be re-imported every year. Heavy workload. Currently, there are few high-performance applications that support Windows computing nodes ."

Will the HPC Server 2008 operating system be better? I don't think so. From a good perspective, this product is based on Server 2008. I think Server 2008 is undoubtedly the best Windows Server operating system. However, a stable server is only the foundation of a high-performance computing system. Although the HPC Server 2008 system has achieved all the metrics, high-speed network support, group management tools, and high troubleshooting functions. But it also has inherent Windows vulnerabilities.

Secondly, HPC Server 2008 requires a driver with a visa. This means that although theoretically it will support high-speed networks, if your network system vendor has not yet adopted a Microsoft drive, you will not be able to use this product in the HPC Server system. For example, Qlogic has just begun developing a drive test version for its InfiniBand Network products.

Now we are talking about Linux. More than 80% of the world's fastest supercomputers are using Linux systems. Currently, many stock trading companies have switched to the Linux system, most of which were previously using the Solaris system. As far as I know, the only major Securities and Exchange Company in London, which is still using Windows systems, was one day a week ago paralyzed. This type of problem makes me afraid to recommend that enterprise users use Windows on their core high-speed computing systems.

Linux, Solaris, OpenVMS, and other high-end operating systems such as AIX, HP-UX, and z/OS have proved that their hardware support and high-performance computing software run well. Implementing the normal operation of high-performance computing systems is a challenge, but there are already many excellent products on the market.

I have read the comparison between Windows HPC and Red Hat HPC solutions (combining the Red Hat Enterprise Linux system with Platform Open Cluster Stack 5 of Platform Computing. This ratio focuses on license fees.

However, if you are an Enterprise CIO or CFO, especially when Microsoft's Enterprise Assurance maintenance protocol and Enterprise Assurance are confused, you will find the actual price of the software very strange. For Windows systems, you need to import system updates frequently. Linux does not. That is to say, if you use Windows HPC, You need to upgrade six times a year, but not Linux.

If you think that the number of required upgrades is not large, please think about it again. This is a high-performance computing system, not a personal computer or a common server. A one-year, six-hour downtime upgrade is a major fault for high-performance computing. I don't care what kind of considerate services you get from Microsoft, none of which is why you bought Microsoft HPC Server 2008.