Designed to support exclusively the AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel Xeon with Intel EM64T, and Intel Pentium with Intel EM64T processors, Microsoft's 64-bit Windows operating system for supercomputers is designed with the purpose of taking high-performance computing (HPC) mainstream. With Windows Server 2008 at its basis, Windows HPC Server 2008 is the successor of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and was released into beta back in November 2007. But for Microsoft, an introduction of the latest version of its Windows platform, aimed at the high performance computing market, seems to be never too late.

On February 13, 2008, the company made available for download the Windows HPC Server 2008 Overview Data Sheet, a resource aimed at delivering a general perspective on what customers will be getting in the second half of 2008 when the RTM is planned. A beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 is already up for grabs.

"Windows HPC Server 2008 combines the power of a Windows 64-bit Server platform with rich, out-of-the-box functionality to improve the productivity, and reduce the complexity, of your HPC environment. Windows HPC Server 2008, provides a comprehensive set of deployment, administration, and monitoring tools that are easy to deploy, manage, and integrate with your existing infrastructure. Windows HPC Server 2008 enables broader adoption of HPC by providing a rich and integrated end-user experience scaling from the desktop application to the clusters," Microsoft revealed.

According to Microsoft, Windows HPC Server 2008 is set to be at the heart of the next generation of technological innovations via its association with high performance computing. The Redmond company has applauded the enhanced levels of productivity synonymous with Windows HPC Server 2008, as well as the scalable performance, manageable infrastructure and monitoring tools.

"Windows HPC Server 2008 is built on proven Windows Server 2008 x64-bit technology. Windows HPC Server 2008 can efficiently scale to thousands of processing cores and includes management tools that help systems administrators proactively monitor system health and maintain system stability. Integration with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Microsoft Windows SQL Server 2008 provides failover capabilities in the event of system failure," Microsoft added.