Microsoft researchers endorse Linux clusters

theinquirer.net ^

[chance33_98]

Microsoft researchers endorse Linux clusters

Knock us over with a feather

By Egan Orion: Thursday 05 June 2003, 09:44

"The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it." Mark Twain

TWO SENIOR RESEARCHERS at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center have endorsed Linux Beowulf clusters as the future of scientific computing.

The pair, Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, casually mentioned this in passing during a presentation given at the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board meeting held last month at Stanford University.

They were presenting a case for de-emphasizing government investments in massive supercomputers in favor of massive data storage complexes. (This particular thesis sounds a bit opportunistic in the brave new world of a Terrorism Information Awareness program at DARPA, but maybe we're merely cynical.) However, it's stunning that any of the Vole's people publicly endorsed Linux for anything, even though they are senior researchers.

It's as though a couple of Fellows from IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center would have endorsed DEC and Unix as the future, during the 1970s. One can almost hear the machinery of Microsoft's PR spin, er... spinning up in Bellevue. But even the Vole can't claim that its systems do large scale scientific computing well, so perhaps this isn't so remarkable.

Yet even Microsoft has to let its scientists pursue honest research.

[KarlInOhio]

Friday 05 June 2003,

THE BODIES OF TWO SENIOR RESEARCHERS at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center have washed up on the shores of Puget Sound after an emergency trip to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

[Michael Barnes]

That's funny///

[Fractal Trader]

FR tech bump -- will these microsoft research fellow be told to walk the plank after their comments?

[stainlessbanner]

bttt

[Only1choice____Freedom]

Most likely they write Linux code an the side.

[eeman]

THE BODIES OF TWO SENIOR RESEARCHERS at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center have washed up on the shores of Puget Sound...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he was fishing near that location the day the researchers were declared missing

[George Smiley]

It isn't really clustering unless it's shared-everything clustering.

Here's a link to the home of real clustering- it's still an order of magnitude better than anything else out there.

[George Smiley]

Let me try that again...

[justlurking]

It isn't really clustering unless it's shared-everything clustering.

It depends on your needs.

There are a lot of number-crunching applications that are massively parallel, and can be farmed out to individual systems without sharing everything.

However, single-image clustering is also available on Linux: http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/.

[Billy_bob_bob]

Yeah. Fishing. With a baseball bat.

[rdb3]

The Penguin Ping.

Wanna be Penguified? Just holla!

Got root?

[Jay D. Dyson]

Interesting tidbit.

For my own part, I'll always cherish the time shortly after Microsoft took over Hotmail. They tried to use their NT platform and proprietary mail system to handle the voluminous amounts of traffic that went through hotmail.com.

The arrangement practically self-destructed within hours.

...then Microsoft quietly put in Sun Microsystems hardware running Solaris and Qmail for the Mail Transport Agent (MTA).

We techno-geeks were rolling on the floor laughing for weeks!

-Jay

[TechJunkYard]

In a related development yesterday, Spanky and Alfalfa, the two most senior members of the He-Man Woman Haters' Club, publically commented that a local girl by the name of Darla was "kinda cute".

Ah, they're growing up so fast.