HPC Server 2008 R2, Excel HPC in Beta

Two high-performance computing (HPC) products have entered beta testing. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, based on Windows Server 2008 R2, has improved scalability, diagnostics and reporting, and scheduling, and Excel 2010 can include additional HPC features, such as support for running Excel user-defined functions or complete workbooks on a cluster. The additions, announced at the Supercomputing 2009 conference in Nov. 2009, extend Microsoft’s HPC offerings, complement hardware provided by partners, and allow users to offload compute-intensive Excel calculations to a server cluster.

HPC Access from the Desktop

Microsoft has been working to establish itself as a significant presence in HPC circles, an area dominated by UNIX and Linux. Windows HPC Server 2008, a special x64 edition of Windows Server 2008 for HPC applications, runs applications on arrays of identical, commodity servers (called compute nodes in HPC implementations) working in parallel to solve compute-intensive problems under the control of a management server or head node. HPC originated in academia and research, but Microsoft is attempting to make it more mainstream by providing easy access to HPC resources from the desktop and targeting the commercial sector for analysis of financial and other business-related data.