Whats the reasoning behind allowing firms to cluster Windows 7 systems together?
The feature you’re talking about here is COW – short for a Cluster of Workstations. This is addressing firms that want to expand their supercomputer clusters, and also want to be part of a green initiative. Imagine you’re a small department within an engineering firm. The Windows 7 systems you’re running are likely to be high-end workstations with 32GB of system memory and processors with four or more cores. A lot of times during design work, that power is idle, and you’ve probably m ade a significant investment in that hardware. If you just add a single server in there running HPC Server 2008 R2, you could cluster those workstations, and maximise the utilisation of that investment. Any system that is not doing anything out-of-hours could be used. In fact, if I walk around the halls of Microsoft, I think we could create the world’s biggest supercomputer, because every employee has three PCs!
