Gates addresses supercomputer experts!

[Dashken]

In the realm of unlikely places for Bill Gates to speak, a supercomputing conference might not top a convention of open-source software fanatics, but it's definitely on the list.

The Microsoft chairman and personal-computing icon stirred up a mix of curiosity and skepticism Tuesday among the crowd of high-performance computing experts who listened to him outline the company's plans to expand into the field.

"It may seem strange to have somebody who works at the very lowest end of computing here addressing the supercomputing audience," Gates acknowledged at the outset of his speech at the SC/05 convention in Seattle.

In fact, the reaction from some attendees suggests that Microsoft has some perceptions to overcome before it is fully accepted into the supercomputing world.

The field, in which research labs and companies use ultrapowerful computers to work with huge amounts of data, has long been the domain of the Unix and Linux operating systems.

Jill Gemmill, assistant director in the University of Alabama-Birmingham's Academic Computing department, said she had been surprised the night before to see banners touting Microsoft's first high-performance computing product, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

Pitching her on the product, the people at Microsoft's booth pointed out the software's benefits -- such as integrated tools for rapidly deploying security patches, Gemmill said.

"I just smiled and said, 'But if I wasn't using your operating system, I wouldn't have that problem,' " she said. Even so, she said the vision outlined by Gates was "kind of interesting."

Microsoft's plan is to expand the market for high-performance computing by making the machines easier for a broader range of businesses and research institutions to operate.

During his speech at the conference, Gates predicted that there will be "supercomputers of all sizes." An accompanying slide referred to it as the "rise of the personal supercomputer."

Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's director of high-performance computing, demonstrated the concept for the crowd by using a "Personal Compute Cluster," running on Windows Compute Cluster Server and housed in a casing small enough to sit next to a desk.

The deskside machine let Faenov conduct an initial analysis of a large set of blood samples used in cancer research.

But for a more intense analysis, he tapped into a larger system that included a computing cluster backstage, running on Linux, and an even larger cluster, running on Windows and accessed over a network from Intel Corp.'s facility in DuPont.

"The arrival of lots of low-cost microprocessors (and) the ability to connect those together with a fairly high-speed data network has led to an exciting new way of thinking about running these high-end applications," Gates said.

Gates said Microsoft expects it to be the norm for Windows and other operating systems to work together in high-performance computing systems, as shown in the company's demonstration.

"Microsoft wants to play a role here -- to be a participant and work with partners to see how our software fits in these solutions," he said.

"These solutions will often be extremely heterogeneous. Unix and Linux have been very important in this environment. ... All these things are going to work together."

More than 9,000 people are attending the SC/05 conference this week, and many of them crowded into a large assembly hall at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center to hear Gates speak.

During a question-and-answer session afterward, attendees asked him about topics ranging computer security to national energy policy.

Even though it is new to the field, Microsoft may be able to apply some of the lessons it learned in personal computing.

The Washington, D.C.-based Council on Competitiveness commissioned a study that examined high-performance computing software programs and found, among other things, that the on-screen interface made them difficult to use, said Melyssa Fratkin, policy director for the council's High Productivity Computing Project.

That's an area where Microsoft may have an edge.

"The user interface may be the one thing that they have that is going to get them into a space that they wouldn't ordinarily be in," Fratkin said.

"People who have never used it before can look at the interface and say, 'Oh, I know how this works. This is Microsoft.' "

Source: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/busine...1_gates16.html