Nathan,
Well, this "burn-in" is about 3 weeks old now and I've had other systems going for a few weeks prior to that using 48 cores. So, availability at the moment is pretty plentiful (something like 2 months now). They all A7 core jobs. Not sure what's needed (if anything) on the windows side to ensure their completion, but I know on the linux side, you're looking at needing a distro that's been released within the last 3 years or so (RedHat 7, Ubuntu 14 fully updated, Fedora 22, etc.) because of certain libraries the core requires.
Sure thing. I'll grab some logs when I'm at work tomorrow.
-Kirk