I know MSFT is starting to push into clustering - the nature of the beast is that it must always seek to expand, to get a finger in every pie. without touching all pies, the economic "network effect" collapses.
I personally have a strong aesthetic attraction to the Linux approach, but think there are rational reasons as well. financial arguments, while true, often devolve into how easily (and $) you can get skilled help. managability, flexibility and robustness would probably be how I argue for a linux cluster to run windows jobs. with Linux underneath, you always have really excellent ability to simply ssh to a node and see what's going on. for me at least, trying to figure out why a windows job is misbehaving is always voodoo. perhaps windows experts have some magic set of add-on tools that give them the level of insight that seems almost effortless under linux. for apps not as compute-bound as rendering, virtualizing windows apps on a linux cluster would also give you the ability to do some nice load-balancing/qos/etc. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
