Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003: Microsoft enters high performance computing market

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003: Microsoft enters high performance computing market

Software giants Microsoft have made an entry into the high performance computing market with the launch of the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 edition. This market is currently dominated by Linux operating system and Microsoft wants a slice of this pie.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is the first operating system from the company designed to run parallel, HPC applications. With this Microsoft claims that they have brought HPC into the mainstream. They claim that this product offer both low cost and ease of use as benefits.

This operating system product is targeted at specialized markets like geological surveys, weather forecasting, defense, engineering and medical research. Microsoft has a good reason to be a part of this market as around 75% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world runs some flavor of Linux. Others are powered by some form of Unix operating system.

Microsoft added that this product would provide a reliable, HPC platform that is simple to deploy, operate, and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools.