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!

Does Windows have that?

Sometimes I wonder, on seeing some wonderful new feature in Linux, whether Windows possesses the same feature. The feature this time, was dynamic ticks, that headline grabbing, gut-wrenching (atleast for 2.6.21) patch that allows Linux to save a lot more power than your Windows laptops. Or does it? I mean, if Windows has that feature, then Linux has just "caught up", and I can't claim advantage.

Thanks to Kernel Comparison: Linux vs Windows -- whose motto is "Everything you wanted to know about your kernel, (but were afraid to ask)" -- I now know that Windows does not support dynamic ticks.

Useful reference that.

G'bye Windows Support

With Windows Vista, it's now two windows versions that I've never seriously used. I stopped using Windows when XP was released about 5 years ago, and have never looked back. I moved to Red Hat Linux, then to Ubuntu, using Debian along the way. This has meant that I'm really out of touch with the "mainstream" computing world.

That is not so bad. Imagine the tons of support requests I'd get, which I now decline with "Sorry I don't use Windows". And I'm not lying either.