The Windows operating system is no stranger to the high-performance computing universe. In fact, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 has established Microsoft as a player on the supercomputer market. And the Redmond company is committed to build on the legacy of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 with a new Windows release aimed at supercomputers. In this context, Microsoft is offering the new Windows HPC Server 2008 built on Windows Server 2008, and the successor of the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. Windows HPC Server 2008 will deliver not only a server operating system for the high-performance computing market but also a suite of tools positioned as accessories to the product, designed to expand productivity, scalability and manageability.

"With the new advancements, Windows HPC Server 2008 can allow customers to achieve the levels of scalability and performance of the most efficient clusters in the Top500 benchmark while making it dramatically more productive to deploy, utilize and integrate the advanced HPC clusters within their environment," said Kyril Faenov, general manager of HPC at Microsoft.

At this point in time, Microsoft pointed to the second half of 2008 for the availability of the final version of Windows HPC Server 2008. For the time being, a beta version of the product is offered via the Windows HPC Server 2008 website. The company failed to provide a more accurate date for the launch of the HPC operating system. Windows HPC Server 2008, according to Microsoft, is positioned to take full on even the most challenging workloads in a high-performance computing environment, and as such, the name was revamped to illustrate the growth of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

"By upgrading to Windows HPC Server 2008 on our 2,048-core production test cluster, we increased the LINPACK performance by 30 percent and were able to deploy and validate the cluster in less than two hours using out-of-the-box software. Expanding beyond traditional MPI-based HPC applications, Windows HPC Server 2008 enables support for high-throughput SOA applications with its advanced Web service routing capability and paves the way for bringing HPC capabilities to a broad range of enterprise applications", Faenov added.