Grid Computing and Clustering — the next OS battleground?

At Gartner’s recent IT Symposium event, Steve Ballmer called high performance clusters a “Linux stronghold,” and explained that Microsoft is gunning for the market with a cluster edition of Windows Server. As George Foreman once said, “generally when there’s a lot of smoke … there’s just a whole lot more smoke.” But in this case, I believe Grids and clusters really will be presented as major battlegrounds between the OS’s in the near future.

As we look ahead to the release of the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 product, I’m anticipating a lot of interesting debate around whether it’s Linux or Windows that’s inherently better suited for Grids and clusters. The debate brings into question not only systems management compare / contrasts (i.e., which OS is easier to manage in a scale-out environment), but also continues the full “TCO” range of discussion about the economics of the two OSs.

Certainly for Grid computing environments — my perception has been that the lion’s share of major deployments out there today are running on Linux. This applies to both research / academic type grids and those deployed in enterprise.

I suspect that this has more to do with the big picture, including applications and underpinnings (the LAMP stack) as opposed to the OS alone. These components have simply become the industry standard for databases and the engines that power web services. Components that happen to be the foundation of the most popular Grid middleware and deployments as well.

Two things that I am absolutely sure of are that the strength and staying power of the Linux community cannot be discounted, and one can never discount Microsoft. Although the picture of a battleground may be drawn, the picture at the end of the day may be far more peaceful than the David and Goliath analogies usually applied to discussions where Linux and Microsoft are mentioned.

The holy grail of Grid computing is true heterogeneity and interoperability with cpu cycles and applications for all. Not only is there a market and an opportunity for either flavor of OS, Grid computing may actually be the common ground rather than the battle ground.