Our experience with porting to Windows NT has been positive. NT has fairly complete device driver support and good documentation. In addition, it has good support for threads and SMP systems. We found the DLL mechanism to be very convenient. The Display Wall project uses a Windows NT-based VMMC cluster for high-performance communication.
Our measurements indicate that the OS overhead on Windows NT is significantly higher than on Linux. However, it provides much better functionality especially in terms of threads and SMP systems.
Finally, we find that the VMMC user level communication architecture is successful in delivering high-performance to applications on both platforms.
Our software is publicly available at
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/SHRIMP/.