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Deccan Chronicle
Once relegated to the realm of national laboratories, supercomputers have started to move downstream. These days, any business with $25,000 to $100,000 to spare can buy a computing system capable of cranking through very difficult tasks. And, in fact, more businesses than ever have started to buy exactly these types of systems as competitive pressure mounts to perform complex operations faster.
With this in mind, Microsoft’s interest in what’s known as high-performance computing (HPC) makes a lot of sense. The world’s largest software maker this week released a new, specialised version of its Windows operating system built to distribute tasks across large groups of computers. Called Windows HPC Server 2008, the operating system uses the same guts as Microsoft’s new mainstream business operating system Windows Server 2008. It’s an update to an earlier super computer-flavoured operating system released a couple of years ago when Microsoft decided to enter this part of the computing market.
While Microsoft dominates the desktop and has a vast presence in the server market, it’s an also-ran in this segment for the largest computers. Most of the top supercomputers run the open source Linux operating system, while a number of other systems use specialised operating systems made by the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems.
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