Microsoft Rejects Itanium Chips From Operating Systems For Clusters
While the world’s most powerful supercomputers run Intel Itanium 2 multiprocessing units, Microsoft Corp. does not want to support Intel’s Itanium-series chips in its operating system designed for clusters, instead, the company qualifies its forthcoming product for x86-64 chips, namely AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon.
Source: X-Bit LabsA report over CNET News.com claims the Redmond, Washington-based software maker said its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition for clusters that contain up to 128 processors will not run on Intel Itanium 2 chips without disclosing the exact reasons for the move, but noting that it had something to with “demand for the product”. It is unclear, whether future incarnations of Windows for clusters will support Intel Itanium 2 chips. Cluster is an array of servers that work in collaboration, but are physically independent. Intel positions Itanium processors for high-end servers and supercomputers – huge machines that consists from numerous building blocks that may be considered as independent, but that still form a single complex. The main difference between high-end servers and clusters is that the former employs top technologies, while clusters can be formed from numerous low-end machines. Typically clusters use Linux operating systems, supercomputers and high-end servers employ various OSes, including Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
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