Enterprise applications Toolkit
Story: Microsoft starting to win over Linux servers
Windows falls down in 2 key areas:
I am not surprised you could not find any examples of larger HPC installations for Windows. The closed source nature of the OS makes supporting it in a HPC environment an expensive headache. All the best of breed tools that have been developed over the years are useless, and there is no way to examine the OS for bottlenecks the way you can with Linux. Second, our tests have found that the multi-threading performance of the Windows kernel to be approximately 30% worse than the performance of the Linux kernel, and as a bonus the scheduling algorithms can be easily and quickly tweaked without impacting the cluster uptime. With the advent of heavily multi-cored nodes, the threading issue is a major one for us because it has a direct impact on the cost per MIPS. If you are an all-Windows shop and you don't mind paying more and getting less, then you might consider a Windows based cluster, but for those shops that are more concerned about performance and supportability over politics, Linux is the way to go right now.
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