Avi Blizovsky
If there is any corner of the computing world that Microsoft's hand has not yet touched, it is the world of supercomputers. There they are quietly dominated by companies like NEC, HP, IBM and Silicon Graphics (not necessarily in that order, and the list of the 500 largest supercomputers in the world anyway changes every quarter).
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday this week that the company is about to enter the world of supercomputing. Microsoft's first cluster operating system is still in beta testing. This is what the prominent computing news sites report.
In a speech delivered at a computing conference in Seattle, Gates announced that the company has reached beta 2 of the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 operating system. The product includes a Windows 2003 version adapted to computer clusters and also software for scheduling jobs and other tasks on the computer. According to the plan, a commercial version of the system will be offered in the first half of 2006.
"Calculations made with the help of supercomputers have helped in many scientific and technological discoveries that have affected the quality of our lives - from the development of safer and more reliable cars and planes to the solution to health and environmental problems." Gates said. "Furthermore, most science is becoming computer science, which is why advanced computing capabilities need to be available through a lightweight end-to-end computing environment.
In a separate announcement, Microsoft said that the new operating system will only be able to run on 64-bit processors such as Intel's Zeon family and AMD's Optron family. Today, 64-bit processors are the standard in servers and slowly they are also penetrating desktop computers.
The question arises as to whether Microsoft is doing everything so that the scientist developing a drug on a supercomputer does not suddenly get a blue screen.
Gates details: Microsoft's plans in the supercomputer arena
Aaron Rikadela, InformationWeek
Microsoft's entry into the scientific computing market may yield supercomputers that are less expensive and easier to use, and even pave the way for innovations in the field of business computing, according to Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, who delivered the keynote speech at the supercomputer conference held in Seattle last Tuesday.
Next year, Microsoft intends to present a new edition of Windows, which will be designed for small supercomputers, and at the same time it has allocated funding for the development of suitable algorithms in ten universities in the US, Europe and Asia. As computing technologies become an integral part of research in biology, physics, medicine and the earth sciences, there is a growing demand for simpler tools that can speed up research, Gates said in his speech at the 2005 Supercomputer Conference.
The methods used in high-performance computers also find their way to industrial applications, including design of consumer products and simulations of car crash tests. Microsoft's future operating system for high-performance computers will be the first to be designed in advance for this market, and will help connect desktop computers to powerful server clusters in new ways. "Computing has become a scientific tool," said Gates. "We need a method that will allow us to expand the smallest supercomputer and make it the largest."
Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 – the final product in 2006
Last Tuesday, Microsoft released a second beta version of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, a new edition of the operating system designed for clusters that include a few dozen computers. The final product is expected to appear in the first half of next year, and compete with the open source Linux operating system that currently dominates the computing cluster market.
The cluster technology makes it possible to connect tens or hundreds of relatively cheap PC servers with the help of special cables and to run software that divides the work between the processors. This method allows universities, research centers that operate supercomputers and computing departments of large companies to enjoy the power of a supercomputer at a lower price than that of architectures designed specifically for supercomputers. Microsoft also plans to add new capabilities to its graphical development tools that will allow scientists to write programs for the computing clusters.
As part of the new initiative, Microsoft grants funding to ten universities "that operate high-performance computers", including the universities of Washington, Virginia, Tennessee, Utah and Cornell. The professors of these universities help Microsoft in the development of algorithms that will work more efficiently on many processors. As processor designers find it difficult to increase the clock rate to improve performance, the chip industry is moving to multi-core configurations, where software code is processed in parallel to improve performance. Because of this, the methods that are used today in high-performance computers, will also reach common desktop computers in five or ten years.
According to Gates, the research and development that Microsoft invests in supercomputers can help develop interfaces that are based on speech or computer vision, improve software performance and yield more effective algorithms in the field of security. "In a way, you can say that supercomputers are the pinnacle of computer science," Gates said.
They knew how to compute
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