Microsoft completes high-performance Windows OS, sets August for general availability

Microsoft Friday completed work on its high-performance Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and said the specialized operating system will be available in August.

The company said it had released the Compute Cluster Server code to manufacturing, a designation that the bits are being committed to DVD for general release. Microsoft will hand out evaluation versions of the operating system at next week's TechEd conference, but copies are now available via Web download.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which rose from a Microsoft Research project introduced in 2000, is Microsoft's entry into the battle with Linux to provide platforms for research and other compute intensive workloads. Linux is clearly the dominant player in the market and experts say Microsoft will face an uphill battle to prove its mettle.

Microsoft, however, hopes to make the platform affordable and drive it into workgroups or departments of companies that run computational intense programs. The company is targeting financial markets, and corporate business intelligence and data mining. Combined with features in Office 2007 called Excel Services, Microsoft also hopes to bring a common interface to the server's capabilities allowing people to set up jobs on the client and have the computational work take place on the cluster. It also has added special features, such as a parallel debugger, into Visual Studio 2005 to support applications built for the cluster, and the forthcoming Vista client operating system is touted as a workstation for the Compute Cluster Server.

Microsoft also is tying the server into the identity, access control and user management features of Active Directory, the Microsoft Management Console, Remote Installation Services, Systems Management Server and performance and monitoring capabilities supported by Microsoft Operations Manager.

“The economics of this are great for bringing a tremendous amount of super computing power to mainstream audiences,” says John Borozan, group product manager for Windows Server division. “But it has not gone mainstream, we think part of that reason is that it is still too complicated to set up a compute cluster.”

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 combines the operating system with a message passing interface (MPI) and a job scheduler from Platform Computing into a single package. Users must deploy a minimum of two of the 64-bit only servers. The first server installs itself as a “Head” node and each subsequent server installs itself as a Compute node and attaches to the Head node.

Thirty-five companies have committed to release by the end of the year products that run on the platform, including Cisco, IBM, Hitachi, and HP.

Compute Cluster Server pricing will start at $469 per node.