Real World Computing

Typically in the business context, you want to be closer than that to your processing power. And given the cost of eight-core 1U servers, it's entirely possible to build a 64-core computation monster for a few tens of thousands of pounds. This is a price/performance ratio which would have been almost unimaginable a few years ago.

Many in the video graphics and effects world are using this processing power as a core component of their business. Film studios like Pixar could not exist without such scale-out capabilities. There are many such implementations that run on Linux on the computation engines, and there is a clear advantage of low cost here. Apple offers an interesting XGrid function in its servers too, and allows you to tie up a bunch of Macintosh desktops, servers and even laptops into a computation engine.

With the Windows offering, Microsoft is going for a dedicated solution which binds the hardware to the task at hand - there is no occasional engaging of the spare processing cycle in the typing pool to help here. The great advantage of the MS solution is the total integration with the rest of the network - so you get authentication and data privacy built in, run against Active Directory. Microsoft claims to be doing well with this product, but it will always be a niche. What will be interesting to watch will be whether we'll be able to buy CPU time from Microsoft's newly built datacenters around the world.

Let it take the datacenter problem away, but let me have ten thousand cores for five minutes for my computational problem. Let's see how quickly Microsoft moves here - after all, it has to start doing something with all this datacenter capacity!

Jon Honeyball

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