Build It And They Will Come

“Well, actually, no they won’t.

“I’m talking about purchasing and installing a brand new Linux
cluster in a pure Windows shop and having any expectations that it
will be used. Your co-workers will probably look at you funny, and
they might stand way over on the other side of the elevator during
that ride up to the fourth floor, but don’t count on them knocking
your door down begging for access to your shiny new Linux
resource.

“What it takes to get Windows users to move work to a Linux
cluster is advocacy, opportunity, and a little luck. In this case
the luck part came about via a conversation overheard at lunch
about a 10 year old legacy application. The code needed to be run
for several days each by four people on their XP boxes. Afterwards
the results are manually collated. Rinse, wash, repeat as necessary
to cover all the parameter sweep cases. Even luckier: the
application was written in C++, albeit using MS Visual Studio.”

Complete
Story