Delivering on its promise to strengthen its high performance computing (HPC) offerings, Microsoft Friday released its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. The software is Microsoft's first to run parallel HPC applications aimed at users working on complex computations.
The new software, which Microsoft said has already been successfully used by several customers, fulfills a promise made by the firm's chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates at last fall's Supercomputing conference.
"High-performance computing technology holds great potential for expanding opportunities within engineering, medical research, exploration, and other critical human endeavors, but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the firm's Server and Tools Business unit, in a statement.
Piggybacking on the Microsoft announcement Friday was technical computing software provider MathWorks, which said its flagship products will support the Microsoft HPC offering. MathWorks said its Distributed Computing Toolbox (DCT), which extends the firm's MATLAB family, will bring high performance computing to the personal and workgroup level.
MathWorks noted that DCT contains support for third-party schedulers like Microsoft's Job Scheduler as well as Platform Computing's Platform LSF. Together they enable users to integrate MathWorks distributed computing tools into their various computing applications.
