Windows HPC Server 2008 & PFX

November 13, 2007 at 11:08 am · Filed under Grid Computing

Two exciting announcements at SC07 came out of Microsoft today.  I wouldn’t normally lump them together into one post (because they are only peripherally related), but Microsoft announced them in the same press release here.  None of this is news to those who follow Microsoft closely, but it is worth a mention.

1. Microsoft announced version 2 of Compute Cluster Server, renamed Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008.  Ever since I saw a preview of this a couple months back, I have been excited about some of the enhancements they’ve made in terms of manageability and interactivity.  Mostly, I’m excited about new interop scenarios between the Digipede Network and HPC Server.  As some resources become available, I plan to do an internal proof of my idea — I hope I’ll have more on this soon.
2. Microsoft announced their Parallel Computing Initiative with the mission of enhancing developer productivity for multicore and distributed systems.  Most exciting (to me) is the announcement of their Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework.  These extensions include mechanisms for expressing parallelism inside managed code.  One thing that will be built on top of these extensions is P-LINQ.  Expect previews of this technology will begin to come out over the next six months.  Why am I excited about this?  Because the more tools that are made available to .NET developers to express parallelism, the easier it will be for the Digipede Network to fit in and managing varying workloads across a large number of disparate computing resources.

Note to Wagg-Ed:  there is no such thing as Visual Studio 2007.

[tags]Microsoft, HPC, PFX, P-LINQ, Digipede, Wagg-Ed[/tags]

Tags: Digipede, HPC, Microsoft, P-LINQ, PFX, Wagg-Ed

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PowerShell v2 CTP

November 6, 2007 at 10:31 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Congratulations to the PowerShell team for getting out their CTP.  I grabbed it this morning to make sure the Digipede AddIn works against it.   Yes it does.

Cool stuff.

Couple of things:

1. WS-MAN needs to be installed before installing the CTP (this What’s New post implies that the remote-shell features need it, but not that it is required).  I hope this is only for the CTP and will not be required in the eventual release.  Any extra requirements make it harder for ISVs to integrate PowerShell into their products.  If you do not have WS-MAN installed yet, go here to get it: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=100350&clcid=0x409
2. This new version comes with a “Graphical PowerShell”.  This appears to be similar to the Shell Tools PowerShell Analyzer product, and not a replacement console.  If you are looking for a better console, check out the other Shell Tools product, PowerShell+.

I will spend more time with the CTP soon and likely have more comments then. 

Tags: .NET, CTP, Digipede, Microsoft, PowerShell, PowerShellV2

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OpenSocial payback?

November 2, 2007 at 9:42 am · Filed under Attention, Web 2.0

Many are calling Google’s OpenSocial play an apparent retaliation against Facebook for their recent Microsoft deal.  The reasoning is that both Microsoft and Google were bidding for a Facebook ad deal.  Microsoft won, so Google is going to make Facebook, and by extension Microsoft, pay.

Perhaps it is payback, but certainly the OpenSocial strategy predates the Microsoft agreement.  Not even Google could pull this whole thing off in just a few weeks.

This begs some questions:

• Did the losing proposal from Google include OpenSocial?  Did it require that Facebook adopt the APIs?  Did that push Facebook to Microsoft?
• Alternatively, was Facebook threatened with OpenSocial as a retaliation?  That is, did Google offer to shelve OpenSocial if Facebook accepted a Google deal?

It isn’t yet clear (to me anyway) whether or not Facebook was briefed on OpenSocial.  Google said yes, then no.  Facebook said no, but some evidence points to them actually having known. 

• Are these differing stories rooted in non-disclosure agreements dating from the failed negotiation between Google and Facebook?

Final question:

• Does anyone really believe that Google would have shelved the OpenSocial strategy just for an ad deal with Facebook? 

I for one do not.

For an excellent post on Facebook / OpenSocial, read Dan Farber.

[tags]Google, OpenSocial, Attention, Facebook, Microsoft[/tags]

Tags: Attention, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, OpenSocial

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Solution found to "The problem with Vista"

October 12, 2007 at 8:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Vista has a cool feature called “Problem Reports and Solutions”.  This tracks problems and periodically looks for their solutions.  These kinds of problems include system and application failures, connectivity issues, etc.

Today it notified me it found a new solution, so I immediately went to see what it was:

Of course, immediately I thought which problem with Windows Vista?  And I’m not being sarcastic here.  I’ve had several intermittent issues with Vista related to networking, hibernation / sleep, sluggishness, etc.  (btw, the sarcasm is best applied to the possible solutions ;). 

So I clicked on the link and got a dialog with this further information:

Again, my question of which problem.  Nothing in the main part of the text says anything other than “the problem” and the “Technical Information” box describes some generic problems.

I would like to see two improvements here:

1. Improve the solution title

Instead of “the problem”, how about:

Follow these steps to improve the reliability of Windows Vista.

The actual title may be limited to the software product to which it relates.  If so, that is a shortcoming, because the actual messaging is pretty unhelpful . . . and it opens Microsoft up to further sarcastic jabs.

2. Provide more information about why this solution was chosen for me

The dialog is pretty unhelpful.  Instead of sending me to the knowledge base, how about some specifics about my own machine?  Something like:

There are X problem reports on your system indicating that this update will improve the functioning of your system.  Click “here” to view these reports.

I would actually like to know specifically what this update is intended to fix.

Tags: KB, Microsoft, Vista

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Vista SP1 Beta

October 1, 2007 at 11:29 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

On Friday, I updated my laptop using Windows Update; the entire install process went smoothly.

Things I’ve noticed.

• In the past, remote desktop connections to non-Vista machines always prompted the user to confirm connection.   New in Vista SP1 is the ability to turn off that warning on a computer-by-computer basis.  A small thing, but I found this really irritating in the past.  Cool.
• The Start -> Search menu is gone.  A little strange, I think.  You can get the same functionality from any explorer window, so I don’t see how this levels the playing field for other search vendors.
• Strangely enough, when I installed the prerequisites (which are purportedly related to improving Vista update performance), my Alps touchpad tray icon appeared for the first time ever.  I clicked on it and found that, again for the first time ever, the touchpad’s unique “device select” tab was available in the mouse control panel.  Weird, but good.  Now I can turn off the tap while typing.

Things I haven’t noticed.

• Any changes in stability.  In general, I feel that the stability of Vista has improved over the year, but my Reliability Monitor tells a different tale.  My reliability index moves between 1 and 3 and hasn’t gotten over 5 since July 31st.  I hope that this changes in SP1, though it isn’t clear how much of this is the OS and how much is bad application behavior.  I wish I could weight failures on the system for how they impact me and possibly exclude them from the Reliability Monitor.
• Any changes in performance. 

All in all I’ve been getting happier with Vista as the year has progressed.  I initially had all sorts of networking problems, but Dell or Intel seems to have mostly solved those.  Long gone are the days when I had to reboot my machine to get it on a network.  We even now have a VPN solution that supports Vista.

Aside from the trouble, I like Vista.  The only part I don’t like about it is feeling like an early adopter with it.  After all, why did I install SP1?  To provide feedback to Microsoft, yes, but also in hope that it makes my experience better sooner.

Tags: Microsoft, SP1, Vista

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System.Uri.Equals(…) What?

August 8, 2007 at 4:03 pm · Filed under .NET

Can someone explain why the following expression evaluates to true?  There must be some historical perspective that I’m just missing.

new Uri("mailto:somebody@example.com") == new Uri("mailto:somebodyelse@example.com")

I would understand:

1. A use case for a separate Uri.Compare method giving the caller control over which components should be compared;
2. If Uri.Equals performed its comparison against canonicalized URIs.

The docs say that the user info, fragment, and  (in older .NETs) query are all ignored for comparison.  There is no mention for the email address in a mailto; however.

What?  Why?

Tags: .NET, BCL, c#, Microsoft

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The Linux Religion . . .vs. Windows (yawn)

July 19, 2007 at 1:32 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

The Linux-guru crowd continues to discount the complexity of installation, maintenance, use, and actual cost of Linux-based OSes. 

It would be a full time job to debunk these arguments over and over again.  Occasionally, Dan takes the time to do just this:  see him dismantle another one of Joe Landman’s CCS attack pieces in Yet another poof piece.  And Dan doesn’t even mention the developer-productivity story . . .

Personally, I tend to ignore the “I hate Microsoft, Linux is the answer to everything” arguments.   You can build a feasible solution with either platform.  As Dan said in his post (specifically about HPC):

Look, I’m not deriding Linux as an OS, or as an HPC OS. It’s been very successful, and it will continue to have success.

The fact is: if you’re using UNIX or Linux, it probably doesn’t make sense to port to Windows.

But if you’re already using Windows, it certainly doesn’t make sense to port to Linux.

They are different toolboxes full of different (albeit similar and overlapping) tools.  Depending on all sorts of criteria, different organizations will do better with one platform than the other.

There is huge growth potential in the market for both platforms.  Can’t we just get past this? 

Or has this truly become a religion?

Tags: .NET, CCS, Digipede, grid, HPC, Linux, Microsoft, Windows

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Innovation Partner of the Year Winner!

July 12, 2007 at 7:25 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

Last night, Dan and John accepted the 2007 Microsoft ISV/Software Solutions Innovation Partner of the Year Award. 

Why Digipede?  According to the press release:

The ISV/Software Solutions Innovation Partner of the Year Award recognizes an ISV that has developed an innovative, new approach to solving a new or existing business or consumer need utilizing Microsoft’s latest server or client technologies. The winning partner has demonstrated leadership in the areas of innovation, market potential, media/analyst buzz, investor value creation and customer adoption with a least three active business customers or 1,000 consumers.

Thanks, Microsoft!

Tags: Digipede, Innovation, ISV, Microsoft

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Innovation Partner of the Year Finalist?

June 14, 2007 at 3:06 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

Yes.

Digipede has been named a finalist (one of three) for the Microsoft Innovation Partner of the Year. 

Microsoft has a whole bunch of very innovative partners.  To be named one of the top three is quite gratifying.

Thanks, Microsoft!

Tags: Digipede, Innovation, ISV, Microsoft

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Digipede does MSDN

June 10, 2007 at 6:14 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

John and Dan are doing an MSDN Webcast Tuesday at 10:00 AM.  It is titled, Scaling SOA in Financial Services with Grid Computing for .NET.  Described as:

Enterprise architects in financial services are looking to service-oriented architectures (SOA) to address many real-world problems – brittle systems with tight interdependencies, data stuck in single-purpose silos, and applications that don’t scale to meet growing demand, to name a few.  But implementing an SOA can also expose new scalability issues.  New high-performance computing (HPC) offerings from Microsoft and its partners are ideally suited for scaling out compute-intensive components of an SOA.  Using real-world examples from financial services companies, this presentation will describe how to grid-enable compute-intensive analytic services for use in an SOA.  

I’ll bet they talk about Digipede in there somewhere.  😉

Go to the link above to sign up.

Tags: Digipede, grid, Microsoft, MSDN, SOA, Webcast

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