Microsoft Makes Big Push at SC05.

This article reports on the initiatives of Microsoft Corp. at the Supercomputing conference in Seattle, Washington, as of November 2005. The main thrust of Microsoft's efforts at the conference was for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which is still in beta. Show attendees could grab a free time-bomb demo copy of Windows Compute Cluster Server Beta 2. Aside from that, the booth consisted of other vendors showing off various products loosely tied to clustering, running on some Windows variant. Microsoft's Compute Cluster Server is aimed at those who feel they need the raw horsepower of clustering but want to stay on the Windows platform. Historically Windows has been a very tough sell in the high-performance computing market, so it is safe to say that the established high-performance computing software vendors do not have too much to worry about from Microsoft--yet.