As my loyal readers know, I recently spotted an article called “Linux is optimal OS for grid computing, says Oracle,” and I took a swipe at it because, well, I disagree. Today I’ll take a little more time to explain my comments about the Microsoft platform, and why we’ve bet our company on grid computing for Windows.

First, think for a minute about why grid computing is a good idea at all. Grid computing rides on top of some of the biggest trends in the IT industry:

• Networks get faster faster than CPUs get faster. Result: Every year, there’s a larger set of problems that can take advantage of distributed computing.
• 32-processor SMP machines are essentially the top of most product lines; these specialized machines are sold in such low volumes that their prices often exceed $1,000,000. Result: Raw processing power is vastly cheaper to buy in single- and dual-processor systems. These are produced in huge quantities, resulting in delightful economies of scale. Such boxes can be assembled into clusters, grids, or both.
• Building applications that take advantage of SMP boxes gets vastly harder the more CPUs you’re trying to manage, and there are very, very few applications that can take advantage of more than 8-way boxes. (John McCarthy famously summarized the situation: “Such systems tend to be immune to programming.”) Result: There are tremendous incentives to use a programming model that works well for many separate single- and dual-processor boxes.
• From Web services to enterprise SOA to a variety of Software as a Service models, more software is being exposed to more users as services every day. Result: Good services that deliver value (in the enterprise or beyond) soon become popular, and as a result consume higher and more variable amounts of computing resources. Even mildly compute-intensive services require a scalability strategy, and are a great fit for grid computing.
• Datacenters are filling up with ever-denser racks of blades and 1-U dual-processor boxes, which can be configured into clusters and/or grids. In many situations, rack space, floor space, power, cooling, and administration have all become more important limitations on scaling than hardware cost. Result: Grid computing technologies that can combine clusters with loosely-coupled resources outside the datacenter (including underutilized department servers and idle desktops) can greatly improve the economics in such situations.

These trends all cut in favor of grid computing — on any OS (or many OSes). Indeed, the above analysis says — “If it were easy, everybody would do it.”  Yet not everybody is doing it. Grid computing remains the “technology of the future,” as it has been for the past decade.  But with all these wonderful trends providing strong incentives toward grid computing, what’s been holding it back?

The answer is applications. Full stop.

It’s way too hard to adapt applications to most grid offerings.

And the applications are on Windows.  And the grid community has ignored mainstream Windows applications for too long.
Once again, as I brace for another episode of “Attack of the Rabid Penguins,” let’s get a few things clear.  Linux is a fine operating system.  For that matter, Mac OS X is a fine operating system, and there are plenty of others.  I’m not a “Microsoft suck-up,” and I don’t pull punches when Microsoft screws up. And I know that there are plenty of scientific and technical computing applications in academia, government, and enterprises that run on Linux, and OS X, and UNIX flavors of all sorts.

But I can count. When it comes to mainstream business applications, applications that run Web services, applications that run on the desktops and servers of CPU-hungry power users at businesses small, medium, and large — it’s a Windows world.

And when it comes to tools that let developers productively adapt those applications to the grid, it’s clearly a Microsoft world.  Microsoft has been about developers and developer productivity longer than it’s been about anything else, and that’s the Next Big Thing in the grid world.  (Anyone interested in recent figures on how Microsoft is doing with developers can check out this eWeek article, aptly titled “Microsoft: .NET Beat Java; Who’s Next?”.)
Find the applications.  Make it easy to adapt them to the grid.  Watch grid adoption soar.  Stay tuned as we make this happen!

Tags: .NET, applications, grid, grid-computing, Linux, Microsoft, Windows

Derrick Harris recently did an interview with me for a story he published today in GridToday.  I think he did a good job — Thanks Derrick!

Then Derrick went slightly overboard and decided to do a separate story about me, in which he claims “The one thing that never ceases to amaze me when speaking with Digipede CEO John Powers is how frank he can be.” 

Look.  I learned at a very young age, and I continue to learn every day, that being open with people is vastly better than hiding things — from co-workers, customers, partners, the press, or competitors.  If frankness is news in this industry, so be it — I choose to take that as a compliment, so thanks again! 

Tags: Derrick-Harris, Digipede, grid-computing, GridToday

Digipede Evangelist Kim Greenlee is headed to Fresno, where she’ll be the featured speaker at the Central California .NET User Group meeting on Wednesday, August 9.  The meeting starts at 6:30 and will be held at California State University, Fresno (Business Center, room 194).

Kim’s talk is entitled From Threads to Grid - Application Scalability and Performance for the 21st Century – a topic near and dear to the hearts of many .NET application developers.  And she’ll be handing out Digipede Network Developer Edition mini-CDs to five lucky attendees.

Worth the trip! 

Tags: .NET, .Net-User-Group, application-developers, developers, Digipede, grid-computing, Kim-Greenlee

Mike Gunderloy,  developer / author / publisher of the Larkware Web site, reviewed the Digipede Network Developer Edition yesterday.  He dug it:

…What The Digipede Network brings to the table is a polished way to set up a .NET-based grid on your own network, ready to undertake distributed computing jobs at a moment’s notice. When you install their product, you get a well-designed layer of management infrastructure together with code hooks that make it easy to submit piece of work to the grid.

Right you are, Mike!  And as for our frequent claims about how easy the Digipede Network is to get up and running — what about that?

Any good .NET developer should be able to get Digipede up and running, and have a piece of their own key application distributed across multiple machines, in less than a day.

Thanks Mike!

Tags: .NET, Digipede, Larkware, Mike-Gunderloy

I adapted the title of this post from an article that appeared this week in PC Welt, entitled “Linux is optimal OS for grid computing, says Oracle.” (I found it through the diligent grid coverage provided by Greg Nawrocki in Grid Meter — thanks Greg!)

The article is primarily coverage of a presentation by Guy Cross, director of Business Development for Oracle’s Asia Pacific Linux Business Unit; the article is a little sketchy, and one hopes Mr. Cross did a better job of linking the platitudes with the conclusions. For example:

To leverage on Linux and the grid, Cross advised enterprises to take the following steps:

1) Standardize. Take inventory to find out what you are running, and ask if the vendors will be around in 10 years, he said. “Do research and find out what the vendors are rallying behind.” The answer, he said, lies in the “O3 zone’ ” open source, open standards and open systems.

2) Consolidation.  Have a 360 view of your business and start to migrate to do more with less, so that there is less cost to manage. Start at the hardware layer and then move to the database and then applications, to higher levels of abstraction.

3) Automate. Take advantage of grid computing by deploying groups of small, cheap servers, or leverage on Oracle on demand to have software delivered as a service, so that the enterprise can focus on its core business.

What?

1. Standardize. OK, and you do that by trying to guess who will be around in ten years?? Maybe industry giants like Compaq, or Digital Equipment, or Silicon Graphics, or Lotus… Get serious. Any tech purchase made today based on a 10-year analysis is doomed; any grid project that doesn’t pay for itself in one or two years isn’t worth funding — something far better will be along in less than two years. This is typical big-company FUD, nothing more.   By the way — what’s the over/under on Oracle’s continued independent existence? If it’s ten years, please excuse me, because I have to call my bookie.

And as for the “rallying” of vendors — vendors are rallying behind two separate banners. First (yes, first — go check), there’s Microsoft and .NET. Second, there’s the “O3″ banner that Mr. Cross identifies, with dozens (or thousands) of sub-banners that permit vendors to claim to be rallying while they’re actually feuding.  And who advocates rallying behind a big, established company working (a bit) with open source? Why, it’s the head of bizdev for Oracle’s Linux group in Asia.

2. Consolidation. Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. The tech industry was born fragmented, and has been fragmenting ever since. Over and over I hear people say “oh, big enterprise IT departments are consolidating — they want to do more business with fewer vendors, because it’s easier to manage.  They want to have fewer platforms, fewer “special projects,” more focus, simpler systems, more control.  Time to standardize and consolidate — you’ll sleep better.”  Guess who I hear it from?  Not from CIOs, who understand where innovation comes from.  Not from department managers or application owners who are in pain and need a solution instead of platitudes.  No — I hear it from big incumbent vendors (and occassionally the analysts they employ).  Every few years we hear about a new giant wave of consolidation, and when the dust clears there are more platforms, not fewer; more vendors in more categories, not fewer; more new technologies to master and monetize, not fewer.  Note to Mr. Cross — that’s a tech trend called “innovation.”  It’s a tech trend frequently resisted by big incumbents too accustomed to comfy margins. 

3. Automate. Automate? What does building a grid using “small cheap servers” have to do with automation? And where does Linux come into it? More small cheap Windows servers are sold every day than small cheap Linux servers. You lost me. Again. And as soon as we’re lost, who advocates for just handing everything over to Oracle so we can focus on, um, something else? Why, it’s the head of bizdev for Oracle’s Linux group in Asia.

My turn:

To leverage on economics and the grid, Powers advises enterprises to take the following steps:

1. Standardize. Take inventory of your computers — what OS do most of them run? Take inventory of your applications — on what platform do most of them run? Take inventory of the skills in your architecture and development group — on what platform are they most productive? Then choose a grid technology that leverages those resources and skills.

2. Embrace fragmentation. Empower departments and application owners with control over resources and development direction. Support them — don’t ignore them.  Start with the applications, not the hardware. Hardware is cheap and getting cheaper! Deploy applications on your grid in rank order of greatest benefit/cost ratio.

3. Simplify. Stay away from grandiose visions that require ten years. Acheive value now by reducing complexity in grid design and implementation, and by keeping the solution focused on where deploying applications to the grid provides the highest benefit/cost ratio.

For each of these steps, Windows dominates Linux in most enterprises as the right OS for grid computing. With a few exceptions, enterprises have more Windows hardware, more Windows software, and more Windows development expertise than anything else. Grid computing is important — but not important enough to overturn platform decisions already in place. “Tear everything out so you can do grid computing?” I don’t think so.

In the end, a grid is for applications, and applications are written in .NET for the Windows operating system.  (You may want to check out the latest figures if you don’t believe me — kudos to Darryl Taft of eWeek.)  Are there exceptions?  Sure.  Enough to make Linux the “optimal OS for grid computing?”  Check back with me in ten years and let’s see.

Tags: .NET, development, Digipede, Grid applications, grid-computing, Microsoft, Oracle