Demonstrating it can indeed rename a product with something that sounds pleasing and not so euphemistic, Microsoft took the wraps off its replacement for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 this morning. It will be called Windows HPC Server 2008, and today, the company taped it out for the second half of next year.

In its announcement, the company invoked the phrase "Top 500" as though Windows had any claim to it. This morning's performance rankings from the University of Mannheim were less than stellar, with Compute Cluster Server only taking six slots. So Microsoft this morning emphasized not only the change of name, but a change of tune, gently positing the theory that perhaps the Top 500 test doesn't gauge real-world performance.

By "real-world," Microsoft wants to turn customers' attention to service-oriented architecture.

"Expanding beyond traditional MPI-based [message-passing interface] HPC applications," stated Microsoft's HPC general manager Kyril Faenov this morning, "Windows HPC Server 2008 enables support for high-throughput SOA applications with its advanced Web service routing capability and paves the way for bringing HPC capabilities to a broad range of enterprise applications."

A public beta of a high-performance computing cluster operating system may not seem quite practical, until you realize it may require something like this to get the attention of universities whose HPC sites are Linux-based. Microsoft referred this morning to an efficiency trial at the Holland Computing Center in the Peter Kiewit Institute at the University of Nebraska, where an 1,151-node Windows cluster is currently being constructed.

It'll have to compete with the 4,604-node cluster that's already there now. That Linux-based Dell PowerEdge SC1435, using AMD Opteron processors, placed #43 in this week's edition of the Top 500 Supercomputers list. The highest-ranking Compute Cluster Server-based system on that list was #116.