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Microsoft in supercomputer drive
But why would you want to go high-performance on Windows?

By Reuters

Published: Friday 29 June 2007

Supercomputing, once the preserve of top scientific and academic institutions which needed entire rooms to house their gigantic machines, can now be had out of a box from Microsoft for $50,000.

The only problem for Microsoft is to persuade small companies on a budget and without IT expertise they actually need it.

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden this week, Microsoft - a tiny player in the $10bn market - campaigned to bring high-performance computing (HPC) to the mainstream.

Microsoft is on a mission to persuade small companies they need - and can manage - affordable HPC systems that run on the familiar Windows system.

So far, Microsoft has about two to three per cent of the market, according to market research firm IDC, with the vast majority of HPC systems running on open source Linux or its cousin, Unix.

But Kyril Faenov, who is heading Microsoft's HPC drive, is bullish about the company's prospects.

He told Reuters: "Windows server has over 60 per cent market share in markets where Microsoft is active. We're aspiring to the same share as we have in other markets. That's a comfortable target for us."

IDC technical computing analyst Jie Wu said there was room for Microsoft to make an impact on the market but it would need good business applications to persuade smaller companies they needed more processing power.

Microsoft has teamed up with partners including French software company Dassault Systemes, the MathWorks and Parallel Geoscience to build applications running on the Windows cluster server.