Grid Meter » Microsoft Cluster Announcement ... Where's the Beef?

June 12, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft Cluster Announcement ... Where's the Beef?

TAGS: None

Microsoft Corp. announced the release of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, the company's first software offering designed to run parallel, high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

A lot of folks have been keeping an eye out for this announcement for quite some time. I for one have a few areas where I was a little disappointed with the amount of detail (or lack thereof) disclosed about this new product.

1) It sounds like this announcement finally brings Microsoft up to speed with where the open source community has been for nearly a decade now ... the ability to group machines in a cluster to solve existing problems with greater speed. Is there any sort of new clustering innovation here that I missed?

2) High performance computing is not just about raw horsepower. It's about moving massive amounts of data from point to point, interoperability with other systems, and presentation of data and computational resources as virtualized entities so processes that need to access them don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do it. How does Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 address these data / interoperability, related considerations?

3) It's only about the infrastructure, there is no talk about mainstream applications. For a company that dominates the mainstream PC applications market you think they could have "Compute Cluster Server"- enabled one of them. It's disappointing to see a huge software player come out with a clustering technology without spelling out any sort of tie-in to their applications. Any details here?

4) Lastly, and this goes more toward confusion than disappointment, why is it called "Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003?" Was it three years late?

If anyone from Microsoft would like to weigh in with answers to these questions (I think they're at least partially representative of some common questions you're likely to get from the Grid community at large), email me at: gridmeter@infoworld.com. Happy to post your response ...

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on June 12, 2006 11:14 AM

RATE THIS ARTICLE: