Robert Myers posted that he thought Microsoft would have a tough time convincing people to switch to Windows because so much of the HPC world is built on Unix or Unix-like software. He went on to suggest that Microsoft may want to consider telling the world that it's not out to make money on their HPC product, but rather to help solve the problems of the world by harvesting spare cycles. (Good thought. I wonder if Robert has a future in advertising?).

Of course, being the good pundit that I am, I had to jump into the fray by pointing out this these developments are a huge threat to using Linux in the production world. I talked about how the cost of the server level Linux distributions are now much higher than companies pay for a license of a server version of Windows. This situation is going to push many IT managers into asking the questions, "I thought Linux was cheaper than Windows?" In fact, I know cases where this is happening. I finished my posting by asking Linux distribution companies to wake up and come up with a reasonable pricing model for HPC systems, for cluster companies to support for an open Linux distribution, and for commercial software companies to support a kernel/glibc combination rather than a specific distribution. I know of one major distribution company who has already developed a much more reasonable HPC pricing model.

Roger Smith, a very experienced and knowledgeable cluster user, jumped in to say, "Amen"! (Thanks Roger!). Roger discussed how Red Hat was charging way too much for a distribution for his cluster (even with educational pricing) and would cause havoc because of the need for commercial compilers and applications that are only supported on these expensive distributions. He made a very valid point that he doesn't mind spending a little more on a distribution but not the amount that Red Hat was asking.

Laurence Liew asked a very good question in response to Roger's comments. He asked what people are willing to spend on a per node basis. He pointed out correctly, that supporting an HPC distribution requires HPC savvy engineers which can be expensive. Laurence guessed that $50-$100 per node was what people might like to see. Joe Landman has a latter post where he asked a very similar question about what people are willing to pay for commercial applications and distributions. Joe made a very good observation that there are several companies that take open-source applications and re-brand them as their own applications and charge a fair amount for them. He was curious about what people would pay for support of open-source applications.

John Burton added some excellent observations. He made the point that regardless of the number of nodes in a cluster, the patches, updates, etc. are stored only on the master node. The compute nodes are updated, patched, etc. by the cluster administrators. John then asked, "Since we're handling the systems administration, installation, maintenance, etc, ourselves, what are we getting for our ($100 per node) money?" He also asked the question that if he expanded his cluster from 100 nodes to 200 nodes, what does the added cost of the distribution give him? He still wants the same thing from the distribution company despite the increased number of nodes - that is, updates and patches for the server node.

Robert Brown had a very long and interesting post in response to Laurence's question. In a quick summary, Robert suggested that cluster people devote a portion of their IT time to supporting an open distribution such as Fedora rather than spend a great deal of money supporting a pointless HPC pricing model from various Linux distribution vendors. Laurence did a good job extracting the major points from Bob's posting and came to the conclusion that Bob would like to see something like a $10-$20 cost per node for a distribution.

This thread was one of the better one I've read on the Beowulf mailing list about what I would term non-technical things (i.e. not about hardware specs or code performance tweaks, etc.). I think the postings from various people point out the frustration that the cluster community is having with non-HPC pricing models. I also think that the commercial distribution companies would do well to pay attention to the opinions expressed by members of the list as there were a number of good ideas, comments, and observations that would help them if they want to keep or build a presence in the HPC cluster market. At the same time, the threads also showed that the open distributions are still very viable in the HPC market and that there may be a need for companies to support these distributions.

Jeff Layton has been a cluster enthusiast since 1997 and spends far too much time reading mailing lists. He can found hanging around the Monkey Tree at ClusterMonkey.net (don't stick your arms through the bars though).