Microsoft has completed the Windows Server 2008 puzzle with the release to manufacturing of the latest iteration of Windows for supercomputers. As previously reported, Windows HPC Server 2008 RTM'ed today, September 22, 2008, an event which was announced at the 2008 High Performance on Wall Street conference. The gold version of Microsoft's latest High-Performance Computing Platform is delivered almost a year after the introduction of the first Beta of the operating system, back in November 2007.

“Companies have to be more efficient than ever with IT resources, but need to maintain their position in a competitive marketplace. They require HPC solutions that deploy quickly, integrate in a heterogeneous environment and scale from workstation to cluster,” Laing said. “The launch of Windows HPC Server 2008 is just another step in our vision to drive HPC mainstream.”

According to Product Unit Manager, Windows HPC Server, Ryan Waite, Windows HPC Server 2008 features no less than 500K lines of code, and is served with over 600 MB of technical documentation. Microsoft has included in excess of 250 design modifications in the successor of Compute Cluster Server 2003, which, despite its name, was delivered in 2006. Waite revealed that the latest iteration of Windows for supercomputers had been downloaded over 3,000 times while it was in Beta stage.

“The HPC industry uses mostly Linux or UNIX servers. To even suggest Windows could be successful in HPC is blasphemy. To build our second release, we went to customers, especially customers who didn’t use Windows. We conducted over 100 customer visits. We did internships, where we would work on site with HPC admins and developers. We created a customer advisory board with leading HPC experts from computational finance, engineering, government, academia and the life sciences, and they were brutally honest with their feedback,” Waite said.

On the HPC market, Microsoft is going against the dominance of the open source Linux operating system. Furthermore, high performance computing is an area where Linux owns the lion's share of the market, while Windows is almost insignificant.