The following is a review of a technical breakout session from the HP Technology Forum in Orlando, FL (Oct. 17-20, 2005). Doug Lora, Senior Product Manager for HPC from Microsoft, and Doug de Werd, HPC Technical Marketing from Hewlett-Packard, presented “Introducing Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server.”
Although it’s a natural step for MS to develop this product, I wonder how long it will last. So far no Windows has been able to run in a network without some form of extra protection, be it a firewall or virusscanner, and seeing how it is based on 2003, I don’t expect this one to be able to do without. And that would defeat the purpose of running a high performance cluster.
My guess is it can only be used stand-alone for Windows specific computing needs (compiling more Windows?). Scientific institutes would most likely stick with the *nix clusters.
Since when is needing a firewall Windows specific? What are you talking about? Your post makes no sense to me. I’ve worked in both Unix/Windows environments and firewalls are used for both.
How is a cluster stand-alone as you imply?? A cluster needs a network and a network isn’t stand-alone.
What’s the big deal with having antivirus software installed? Some of them are system hogs (norton) but there are much better alternatives out there. Any environment needs to be set up and configured properly and securely, no OS is excluded from that.
A BSOD cluster, hehe.