Following the availability of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft has just one piece of the Windows Server 2008 puzzle to deliver, namely Windows for supercomputers. Fighting to make inroads into the high performance computing territory dominated by the open source Linux operating system, Microsoft is preparing to release Windows HPC Server 2008 on September 22, 2008. The date coincides with the 2008 High Performance on Wall Street conference in New York.

According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft plans to make the gold version of Windows HPC Server 2008 available at the Roosevelt Hotel event. In this context, the Redmond giant is wrapping up almost a year of work since the operating system debuted into Beta. The first testing milestone of Windows for Supercomputers was delivered back in November 2007, and the company has since then advanced past the Release Candidate stage.

Windows HPC Server 2008 RC1 was offered at the end of June 2008. Microsoft pointed to the second half of 2008 for the delivery deadline of Windows for supercomputers, but the company failed to pinpoint a release date. The June RC1 built was followed by the Release Candidate 2 development milestone which also went live on Microsoft Connect. And now Microsoft is closing in to finalizing the successor of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

The High Performance Computing market is dominated by Linux, with Microsoft seeing Windows for supercomputers gaining very little traction. Statistics from June 2008 Top 500 indicate that Linux is powering over 85.4% of the top 500 supercomputers worldwide, while Windows accounts for just 1%. Still, with the advent of Windows HPC Server 2008, the Redmond giant could see its share of the HPC pie increase. There are already good indications of such a scenario, including the adoption of the Beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 on a National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) machines ranked 23^rd among the top 500 supercomputers in the world.