Windows HPC 2008 Goes Beta

Performance and manageability improvements in the next version of Microsoft’s edition of Windows for high-performance computing (HPC) could improve the company’s standing in the growing market for HPC clusters—groups of identical, low-cost servers usually running the same application. Released as a beta in Nov. 2007, Windows HPC Server 2008 is based on the x64 version of Windows Server 2008 and will replace Windows Compute Cluster 2003. However, Microsoft still has an uphill battle against Linux, which is the dominant OS among the most powerful HPC clusters.

Growing Server Opportunity

HPC generically refers to the application of multiple processors or computers working in parallel to solve compute-intensive applications. HPC has its origins in academia and research, where it has been used in applications such as weather simulation and physics data analysis. More recently, HPC has been adopted in the commercial sector to analyze financial data and seismic information for oil exploration, among other applications.