Hi,

I was just wondering,
I have a Wndows app that requires tremendous amounts of resources. It's used for the stockmarket's data analysis. it lots and lots of mathematical calculations.

would it be possible to cluster a bunch of Linux servers, and then run VMware or some other windows emulator, to benefit from the additional resources of the cluster?

No, a virtual machine (which is *NOT* a Windows emulator by any definition) would still only run on one physical node of a cluster, so not provide any performance boost.

To add on to what acid_kewpie said, in order to run on a cluster, your software has to be specially written to take advantage of multiple processors. Depending on what the software actually does, this can be fairly simple (separate processes don't have to talk to one another so you can just farm out work in a master/slave sort of system), or complex (the processes are quite dependent on data from one another and need to exchange information constantly). If the software is designed to use something like MPI or a similar setup to run in parallel, you can run it on a cluster. However, I'm not sure why you'd want to added overhead of virtualization (running one virtual Windows machine on each physical Linux server). I'd think it would be simpler to either port the code to Linux or look into something like Windows HPV Server 2008, which is designed tio run high performance clustered apps on Windows. It's Windows, though, so prepare to open your pocketbook. Also, most high performance computing clusters run Linux so the Windows product it substantially less mature.