Microsoft made the latest iteration of its Windows operating system for supercomputers available as a free download. On September 22, 2008, the same day the high performance computing platform was released to manufacturing, the gold bits of Windows HCP Server 2008 went live on the Microsoft Download Center. The Redmond giant has bundled Windows Server 2008 HPC Edition and the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 in a single package including a pair of DVDs weighing in at over 2.6 GB.

“Windows HPC Server 2008 is very much a part of our total server family, which represents an $11 billion business for Microsoft. It’s no secret that currently our HPC server business is one we’re working to build, but make no mistake: Microsoft is committed to high-performance computing,” stated Vince Mendillo, director of the HPC Marketing Group at Microsoft.

Windows HPC Server 2008 is designed as the successor of Windows Compute Cluster 2003 and was shipped just two years after its precursor. The latest version of Windows for supercomputers essentially offers the 64-bit flavor of Windows Server 2008 which can be scaled and adapted to thousands of processing cores.

“Windows HPC Server 2008, along with other Microsoft applications, servers and tools, will together take HPC mainstream. Our goal is to make it a part of mainstream computing, make it available to companies that could previously not afford it, to IT pros who found HPC too daunting to consider and to users who have problems that require supercomputing performance but have never had access to it before,” Mendillo added.

Via the Windows HPC Server 2008 package, Microsoft is offering a free trial version of the Windows for supercomputers platform as well as the HPC Pack 2008 including tools, interfaces, and management solutions spanning from job scheduling to networking.

Windows HPC Server 2008 is available for download here.