Some thoughts on Windows HPC

Also known as Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, or Windows Server 2003 R2 + Compute Cluster Pack (which we used).

I'm hugely grateful to the following communities:

• The Linux Kernel Team: for a kernel that detects all the exotic hardware that we pushed at it and works with all of them out of the box. Without requiring BIOS upgrades. Without hanging forever, with no indication of what went wrong.
• The Linux Kernel driver authors: for giving us 100% hardware performance out-of-the-box without any tuning whatsoever. Seems silly to praise this, but yes, thank you! And without "Quality Labs" certification too!
  
• The Debian GNU/Linux Project: for building one of the finest customizable distributions out there. And one that requires no license keys. And that downloads updates using standard mechanisms that allow me to accelerate update delivery.
  
• The FAI authors: For a system that installs an entire OS with applications and configures it in 4 minutes flat across all nodes (dependent only on Internet speed and network and disk transfer rates). And without borking on "incorrect" license keys despite us doing everything correctly.
• The OpenSSH authors: for a secure, remote shell that integrates very well with the system, allowing us to save loads of time, and doesn't have silly restrictions on the number of concurrent users.
  

Windows 2003: "The most productive platform ever". Yeah right.

And before I forget: to the people who implemented "Last Known Good Configuration", thank you!

Why FOSS is Better, Yet another Case Study

Recently developers at Intel released a tool called PowerTOP. For users familiar with top on Unix systems, this tool is similar, except it displays information on programs that are "waking" up the CPU often. What does this mean? To cut a long story short, it means you can now identify which programs are interrupting a CPU's sleep, and determine if that interruption could have been handled in a better way, letting the CPU sleep longer. That way, battery power could be saved.

Why is this tool a good example of Free Software at work? Not only did the developers create this tool, they also identified many free/open source software programs where things could be done better. Because the source was available, they were even able to make patches -- or modifications -- available so that battery life was extended by "an hour or more!" This is amazing. Imagine doing this on your insert-favorite-proprietary-operating-system here. It'd take years for the OS vendor to get it, then the programmers to get it, and then for them to get together and do it.

Why is this on my blog? I use liferea, a feed reader that manages my RSS feeds, and the latest release has this cryptic changelog: "This release decreases CPU power consumption for laptop users". My life is already better, thanks to PowerTOP.

Oh yeah, bonszai says, "Thank you, Intel!"