By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Platform Computing has taken the beta off its Infrastructure Sharing Facility, a way of greasing the adoption of Windows HPC Server 2008 among the supercomputing folk.
Having seen a zillion different operating systems and architectures over the past three decades, these HPC techies like the portability and commonality of Linux across the remaining incompatible server platforms. But Windows not being Linux is not an insurmountable barrier. he HPC variant of Windows runs on x64 iron, which is what most supercomputer centers use if you don’t count Itanium-based machines or the exotic custom-made and often hybrid supers installed at the largest (and usually government sponsored) facilities. (Windows HPC Server could run on Itanium boxes, but it doesn’t).
