Increased processing power coupled with lower-cost hardware is making supercomputing a more viable platform for corporate buyers running data-intensive business applications.

That was a major theme at the 18th annual Supercomputing conference held last week at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle as vendors combined forces in an effort to spread supercomputing beyond its academic and research roots. Leading the charge was Microsoft, which has had a presence at the high-performance computing conference since 2003, but stepped up its profile this year with a keynote address by Bill Gates (transcript of Gates's address).

In addition, the software giant used the conference as a launch pad for its formal entry into the market dominated by Linux.

"The [big] message is that Microsoft is entering scientific computing, technical computing, and we will bring all the attention and commitment that we have given to business and consumer computing in the past to this new area where computation is poised to make a significant impact," said Kyril Faenov, directory of high-performance computing at Microsoft.

As part of that commitment, Microsoft is readying an operating system tuned for high-performance computing: Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. The software is in its second beta release and should be generally available in the first half of next year, the company said.

Microsoft also said it has set up 10 high-performance computing institutes in universities around the world to support research and drive the company's efforts to meet the software demand for computing-intensive environments.

At the same time, vendors such as HP and InfiniBand switch-maker Voltaire announced support for Microsoft's cluster efforts. Platform Computing, which makes resource-management and orchestration software for high-performance computing clusters, said it was partnering with Microsoft to integrate its work scheduling Platform LSF software into Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

Industry experts note that Microsoft has a tough battle ahead as it tries to break into a market that has been dominated by more specialized, higher-end software and systems, such as IBM's Blue Gene, a commercial version of the supercomputer ranked as the fastest in the world.