Comments

By Gary Stiehr, June 16, 2006 11:21 pm

I’ve been seeing a lot of conversations on blogs and mailing lists about Microsoft’s recent release of its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and how it might affect the Linux cluster market.

From reading the overview, it does seem that building a Windows cluster should be a bit easier now (versus building a Windows cluster before this product).  There is a new MPI-2 implementation and a builtin scheduler.  However, many of the other benefits they presented, including integration with Active Directory, do not seem to be anything new or specific to their WCC product.  One good point is that their Remote Installation Service (RIS) seems to be included in the prices and I’ve heard (but not confirmed) that the price per node is less than buying a non-WCC Windows licence per node.

They list as benefits integration with Active Directory, MOM, SMS, etc. and better support in Visual Studio for parallel application development on their platform.   It seems, however, that all of these things need to be purchased separately if they are wanted.  Further, it would seem odd if you couldn’t integrate Windows nodes with these Windows infrastructure tools anyway.

Just for practicality, it seems easier to obtain a Linux distribution where you get most of the infrastructure and clustering tools you need already included.  Of course there are many conversations as well about the technical qualities of Linux versus Windows.  Regardless of that, with the current WCC product, there are not enough advantages and a lot of unknowns (e.g., how well is the support for interacting with the individual Windows consoles, how good is the builtin scheduler, etc.) to really be competetive with Linux clusters.  Perhaps as the product matures and if ISVs develop products for it, things may change but then you have to do the technical comparisons and benchmarking to compare the two platforms at that point.

It seems that for organizations with existing Windows infrastructure and a desire to stick with Windows on all of their systems may lean toward the WCC product if they need a cluster.  For users who are not stuck on a Windows-only environment, there seem to be many advantages to going with Linux clusters, including cost, software availability/maturity and a lot of community support and web sites.  So for now, from what I can tell about WCC, it seems that Linux is still far ahead as the choice for HPC clusters.