RSSWindows HPC Server 2008 ships: Is this a 'cloud' alternative?
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published September 22, 2008, 11:51 AM
"Cloud computing" is so attractive: it enables enterprises to outsource their IT by offloading their logic onto third parties' bigger hosts and save costs. But if businesses could own their logic and still cut costs, would they do it instead?
There's already a cottage industry whose foundation is the presumption that corporate data centers will be so inclined to outsource their data processing to so-called "cloud computing" services, such as the one developed by Amazon, that expenditures for high performance servers could go down in coming years. CIOs are already estimating they can save their enterprises as much as $300,000 per year annually, on average, in hiring expenses for IT personnel, if they're able to shift their resources to low-cost hosting services who'll maintain their infrastructure and their applications for them.
But what if that's not the only option? Microsoft Windows has never been a major factor in the upper echelon of high-performance computing, though it's playing a significantly greater role in everyday data centers. And Cray used to be the Packard or Studebaker of high-end computers, until the era of multiplexed Intel and AMD processors nearly made the brand a permanent resident of American history museums.
Both have something to prove, and last week they presented a new and impressive case for themselves: Consider, if you will, a relatively low-cost supercomputer -- not a datacenter cluster, but a small neutron bomb of sorts that can sit on companies' desktops, be maintained by maybe one or two people, and sell for $25,000. If it runs on Windows, one thing you can say for it is that businesses can find trained personnel to maintain it, and they won't necessarily be expensive.
That's the significance of the two companies' joint effort in small-scale supercomputing. Last week, Cray premiered the $25,000 CX1 desktop supercomputer. And today, Microsoft took the next step forward in that effort by releasing Windows HPC Server 2008 to manufacturing on schedule; this is the OS that will be shipped with the CX1. It entered beta in November 2007.
HPC Server 2008 replaces Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server 2003 product line, at least officially. The way it really works, the Datacenter edition of Windows Server 2008 will be marketed toward data centers with clustered architecture; HPC Server will move toward this new niche Microsoft and Cray are building, of small but very powerful integrated units.
Running 64 cores at something north of 750 gigaflops, you could effectively say the Cray CX1 is a data center cluster of one. However, with OpenMP support, it can actually be paired with other processors fairly easily; and it's that support which is a critical feature of HPC Server 2008.
Two computers like that and you'll meet the hardware requirement for running Adobe CS4.
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|Can I install Windows Vista Ultimate on it!?!
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|What killed the Cray initially was that it was monolithic - you assigned one job to it in a time slice.
Along came the multitasking, dynamically allocatable, scalable RS6000SP and the monolithic Cray was effectively dead.
Having a lot of CPUs is not that big a deal. What will be interesting to see is how the OS is able to allocate and manage a mixed bag environment and to do more than simply to have access to a lot of CPUs.
And who is writing software optimized to run on this platform and OS...
There are simply too many unanswered questions at this point.
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|yes....but can it play solitare??
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|no it play's chess
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|A supercomputer for supporting desktops and application hosting???? Hmmm.
Maybe a 'big server', but a supercomputer?
Pray tell where is the advantage in using massively parallel computing to process serial or marginally multithreaded apps?
Words mean things - and the use of the term supercomputer paired with application hosting is a bit of a misnomer.
A cluster of CPUs does not a supercomputer make.
I am curious to hear you tell us about the massively parallel version of Windows that manages these resources - as well as the apps optimized to run in massively parallel form!
Why do I have the feeling that MS is taking yet another established industry standard term and redefining it for their purposes - much like they took "mirroring", renamed it "ghosting" (LOL!) and used "mirroring" to describe identically configured HW?
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|HW?
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|h a r d w a r e
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|"Why do I have the feeling that MS is taking yet another established industry standard term and redefining it for their purposes - much like they took "mirroring", renamed it "ghosting" (LOL!) and used "mirroring" to describe identically configured HW?"
Wasn't that because of Ghost, the program which then became a colloquialism for said process?
And wasn't mirroring already used for identically configured HDDs? (I can't find any dates surrounding when the RAID levels were first devised, but I am pretty sure they came up with the name first)
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|Mirroring of drives has been a standard term since at least the late 80s. And it was WIDELY used in the larger non-desktop world that many forget exists.
Ghost was a puny late to the party desktop backup program for creating an hdisk copy.
But its nice to see that MS discovered the game just a few years ago. And its even funnier when you refer to a mirrored drive and a MS admin has no clue as to what one is referring.
The fact is that mirrored hard drives and redundant high availability systems have been in widespread use LONG before MS opened their eyes and became aware of them.
In fact, at the MOST basic level, several OSes have had the capability to create up to a 3-way mirror with complete inter and intra-disk allocation policy control (placement on each drive as well as how it is parsed across multiple drives - heck, if you were really anal and a bit daft, you could even build a map file and place each individual sector on each drive! - and no, this is not the RAID nomenclature of which you are aware) to make a basic 2 way copy, to add a 3rd copy, or to reduce the number of copies to 2 or 1 with a simple command at ANY time on a live system as well as extending (adding) or reducing the number of hard drives involved at any time as well. But it doesn't stop there! The neatest aspect is the ability to split off one 'copy' and to logically relabel it in the same command step on a LIVE system with ACTIVE access to the affected resources (!!!)- thus effectively creating a portable backup of the LIVE resource at ANY time without corruption.
Oh, I should add that the mirrors were not limited to simple drives or file systems on one drive (rather pointless!) - the copies were distributed over up to 36 hard drives (and more if you played with the inode allocation). So you could have a file system or logical volume spanning MANY drives mirrored to another set of multiple drives complete with specified allocation (if one desired).
Control and capabilities that are still far beyond what Windows dreams and probably far beyond what many are aware - and all of this was readily available more than 10 years ago!
I am rather surprised that MS, when they finally discovered that TCP/IP was indeed the industry standard, that they did not come up with a new moniker for it too when they finally chose to incorporate it and label it a new MS innovation! It may come as a shock to some, but MS did not invent IT. And it is a day late and a dollar short when it comes to innovating large system technologies that they are only now implementing on the small systems in a very limited manner.
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|No reason to push up your ego. You can buy RAID 1 drives as consumer products at BestBuy or your other temples for a few years now.
Well maybe not this time but you could try and transfer your outstanding balance to a new credit card so it doesn't get declined - or borrow some more against that trailer equity.
We are here to help, you know...
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|WOW! Really!? That takes my breath away!
No wonder with such amazing capabilities as you describe becoming available in just the last couple of years (and ironically only at the HW/controller level and not the OS level, does MS think they have the right to redefine terms for technologies FAR more mature and more extensive than MS has ever implemented.
NEAT! This is the 2nd time in about 2 days where one post is submitted yet it displays twice - one labeled as edited!
Gee Rocky! I didn't know my own strength!
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|WOW! Really!? That takes my breath away!
No wonder with such amazing capabilities as you describe becoming available in just the last couple of years (and ironically only at the HW/controller level and not the OS level, does MS think they have the right to redefine terms for technologies FAR more mature and more extensive than MS has ever implemented.
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|Heh. Has your autocomplete gone a bit bonkers?
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|WOW! You two really should get jobs. If you do have jobs, you should probably be fired. ;)
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|hee hee. Seriously, I've been watching you guys(?) trade shots for the last while and you both seem pretty up and into these technologies. Maybe you should get together and start a "Siskel & Ebert" of the computer tech news world? We could all sure use it.
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|I don't use auto-complete.
But I am using Firefox3, and I can say that the memory leak problems are NOT fully resolved - with SnagIt captures to show the browser with no tabs live and memory not released at all as reported in several additional tools!
I wonder if the memory issue may not have something to do with this...
;-)
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|The technology available in the industry is pretty cool.
It just irks me that MS - who comes along late to the party - oft introduces a baby form of a standard that has been available in a MUCH more capable and mature form for quite some time, and tries to redefine the basic terms for the industry as a whole.
Its enough for them to use the industry standard terminology and simply brand their stuff with some nifty moniker.
And now I suspect they have a "supercomputer" that doesn't do massively parallel computing while hosting non-massively parallel enabled applications. ...Rendering it simply a CPU dense server.
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|Come on. Grant me this tiny bit of fun in life...
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|It IS irksome. However, sadly, appropriation is arguably the cornerstone of economics. It's part of the delusion that seemingly most of us are quite willing to partake in. We should all be aware that only nothing exists in a vacuum - all else is a collective.
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|"But its nice to see that MS discovered the game just a few years ago. And its even funnier when you refer to a mirrored drive and a MS admin has no clue as to what one is referring."
What the fig are you babbling about? MS has used the term Mirroring for a very long time, and most MS admin would know that unless there complete idiots.
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|Yeah, I agree it's irritating.
You have to admire how consistently they pull it off though. They have/had some amazing marketing guys.
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|Haha, yeah, I try to keep up as much as possible with what's going on. Slow down for even a minute and the next generation of IT has passed you by.
I'm not sure opinionated tech journalism is the way forward for either of us though.
It seems to work for BetaNews though *ahem*
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|Rolls eyes...
Anyone who has been around would know that!
So I erroneously thought...
But we ran into EXACTLY that during a ISO17799/CoBIT policy and procedure review at a MAJOR financial player where, upon inquiring as to the how/what/where/etc of their storage we referred to "mirrored data" - at which we were met with confusion - after which we explained the concept - we not only had it 'explained' to us that that was called "ghosting", but that "mirroring" was the replication of the hardware "cluster". Of course, as we knew it all, we tried to explain the use of the terms upon which they produced MS literature upon which they based their opinion - and sure enough, there it was - industry standard terms redefined in exclusive MS terminology.
And that's not the 0nly time I have run into the terminology issue! In fact we were also recently laughing about it with a few colleagues at the last VMWare dog and pony show a few weeks ago where others had experienced the same thing...
Call it "ghosting" if you like, all it tells me is that you have only grown up sadly exposed ONLY to the world according to MS. And the big world of IT must appear to be a very amazing and startling place to those with such a limited world view.
Idiots? You pick the terms. Nevertheless its true.
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|This is cool! Multiple posts with only one submission!
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|Meh, words get redefined. There's plenty in language nowadays that meant different things before. Doesn't mean we should stop using the new definition.
Obvious one being 'gay'.
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|I think you're a bit wet on this--"ghosting" did not come from Microsoft. That honor goes to Binary Research, which was later purchased by Symantec. If you look back at NT Server going WAY back, they had support for SW mirroring--and it was called mirroring, not "ghosting."
And as for HPC apps, they are aiming this mostly at industry verticals, along with some more general-use apps such as Matlab and Mathematica. It uses an MPI stack just like *nix clusters, so yes, it really is a modern supercomputer. And for x86, they are seeing record efficiency scores (on LINPACK, anyhow).
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|Well, apparently you are dealing with idiots. It's said to see, but never the less true.
No I've never called it anything. I've been in this business for more than 20 years now and used most all OS's on a regular basis. It's said to see, but apparently you are right about the industry as a whole. But even MS techs know the difference even if the marketing division does not... surely. There has to be a few left that do? One would hope. LOL
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