Nearly a year after Microsoft announced a collaborative relationship with the Cornell Theory Center, the software giant has confirmed that it is venturing into the Unix dominated world of high performance computing (HPC). A special distribution of Windows Server 2003 called Windows Server 2003, HPC Edition is being crafted to tackle intensive parallel computing workloads, make developing high performance applications easier, and to deploy and manage clusters.

The watch word for Microsoft is cost. Affordable off-the-shelf hardware and distributed computing technology have removed the barriers in the marketplace that previously relegated supercomputers to a niche market that lacked widespread commercial viability. Given this fact, Windows Server 2003, HPC Edition is being developed with total cost of ownership in mind.

It is no coincidence that Microsoft is eying the HPC market. Today, Apple revealed that it has sold a cluster of G5 servers to the United States Army in order to build one of the world's fastest supercomputers which will be used to investigate hypersonic flight. As clearly demonstrated by Apple, the democratization of HPC technology has opened the door for customers to explore Windows alternatives in absence of an available solution from Microsoft.

"While mainframes and SMP Unix servers have long dominated the market for supercomputers, more businesses, academic institutions and non-profits are turning to clustered servers. Linux and Mac OS X are two operating systems drawing attention for low-cost supercomputers," said senior Jupiter analyst Joe Wilcox.

Wilcox continued, "Linux will run on the same hardware as Windows Server, so why should Microsoft cede that market opportunity to the OS Microsoft execs have called a No. 1 threat?"

If Microsoft misses the high performance computing boat, it risks losing out on lucrative contracts with vertical industries outside of academia such as engineering, life sciences, and finance.

To make its offering more attractive to would-be buyers, Redmond has lined up partner OEMs including AMD, Dell, IBM, Intel and HP along with enlisting ISVs to potentially offer support for its HPC solutions. Moreover, Microsoft also claims to be abiding by established HPC standards like Message Passing Interface (MPI).

According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2003, HPC Edition is expected to ship in the second half of 2005. Final pricing and packaging decisions have not yet been made. More details are available in case studies published on the Windows Server web site.