Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
Microsoft's HPC 2008 Now Live
9/22/2008
Microsoft Corp. announced this morning that the High Performance Clustering (HPC) Server 2008 has been released--both to manufacturing and the general public.
The software is the next generation of Microsoft's Computer Cluster Server 2003. With its release, Microsoft will be taking on Unix and Linux's significant dominance in the supercomputing market. And it appears to know the challenge it faces.
"Yes, there are a lot of skeptics. The HPC industry uses mostly Linux or Unix servers. To even suggest Windows could be successful in HPC is blasphemy," commented Ryan Waite, Microsoft's Windows HPC Server product unit manager, in a blog post this morning announcing the release. Waite said the group researched exactly what it needed to do to compete, talking with Unix and Linux supercomputer administrators, and focused the product around that feedback.
And while it has yet to be seen how successful Microsoft will be at its run, the company appears to be taking the challenge seriously. Redmond has partnered with Cray Inc. as an OEM for HPC Server 2008 and announced a new line of supercomputers starting at $25,000. And, according to the company, the No. 23 fastest supercomputer in the world, at 68.5 teraflops, is running HPC Server 2008.
In a Q&A posted on Microsoft's Web site today, Vince Mendillo, a director of marketing for Microsoft, said that the company's doesn't just want to compete in the supercomputing market, it also wants to bring supercomputing into the mainstream. "Our goal is to make it a part of mainstream computing, make it available to companies that could previously not afford it, to IT pros who found HPC too daunting to consider and to users who have problems that require supercomputing performance but have never had access to it before," he commented.
According to Microsoft, a free trial download of the final version of HPC Server 2008 will be available today starting at noon Pacific time.
Becky Nagel is executive editor, Web Initiatives for the 1105 Redmond Media Group and the editor of Redmondmag.com.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Tufts Grants Rights for Mileage-Increasing Transportation Technology to Electric Truck
Tufts University has optioned rights to a technology that can recharge the batteries of any hybrid electric and electric-powered vehicle while it is driven. The Tufts-developed technology could increase by 20 percent to 70 percent the miles per gallon or total driving range performance of vehicles like the Honda Civic, Ford Escape, and Toyota Prius hybrids and the Tesla Motors and Phoenix Motorcars electric vehicles.
- U Florida and Cyntellect Collaborate to Unlock Mysteries of Cancer Stem Cells
The University of Florida has entered into a research agreement with life sciences company Cyntellect. The university's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research will work with the company to focus on a variety of research areas including the purification and analysis of cancer stem cells (CSCs), rare cells believed to be directly involved in propagating cancers.
- George Mason U Receives Grant To Deploy Intergraph Apps for Intelligence Curriculum
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, VA has been awarded a grant from Intergraph to enable students enrolled in GMU's Geospatial Intelligence Graduate Certificate program to use the company's geospatial production and exploitation software as part of their core curriculum.
- Institute for Cyber Security at U Texas, San Antonio Opens Incubator
The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) has launched a new Internet security incubator. The incubator was developed to commercialize promising technologies that address major cyber security and privacy issues. The first companies to enter the incubator are Denim Labs and SafeMashups.
- ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard
ISO/IEC has published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications.
- Dynamics NAV 2009 ERP Coming Next Month
Microsoft exec Kirill Tatarinov Wednesday described some new features to expect in the forthcoming Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 enterprise resource planning solution. He gave the keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2008 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
