High-End Workstation Compute Farms Using Windows NT

This paper describes our experiences in building and deploying Windows NT^* based high-end workstation compute farms within the Intel engineering community. An overview of Intel’s compute requirements is presented, along with the solution developed to address Intel’s large compute cycle needs. The paper discusses NT’s contribution to the solution, including recognized NT strengths as well as migration and deployment challenges we faced. The paper emphasizes workarounds to known issues for other user communities to leverage, but also enumerates areas in which Windows NT and the Win32 API^* could be improved. Our paper concludes that despite many challenges, NT based high-end workstation farm computing is viable.