Erdos Had The Number First

No, it’s not called Grendel, though it ought to be[1]. MS released the Windows Computer Cluster today and holy crap could this be an important technology for MS.

Why is that? The biggest thing is the integration with Active Directory. Now, I’m no MS fanboi, but AD is some pretty cool tech. Having this tool (the CCS) integrated with AD is important because it means that you can have your admins work in a tool they already know.

This integration, combined with the scheduling part of the CCS, means that you can define machines that are workstations by day and clusters by night. This is a big deal because, before this, you had to dual boot. Dual booting a rack of computers is a HUGE pain in the admin.

With this tool you could have your rack of 42 1U Quad AMD servers (with a total of 168 procs) service 336 office workers (at least) via windows terminal services, and then after hours run that whole thing as a supercomputer. Wash, rinse, repeat.

You would be very surprised how many organizations can benefit from this kind of thing (yeah, most of them are financial or insurance, but it’s still a lot). This tool is not a killer of Beowulf, but it will certainly make some waves.

Footnotes:

[1] I know, grendel got killed by beowulf, so maybe it’s not a name that marketers would pick. But it sounds cool, doesn’t it?