Microsoft rolls out HPC Server 2008 on Wall Street

From InfoWorld: This may seem like a weird time to go to Wall Street to announce a new operating system, but that's what Microsoft did Monday. At a technology conference in New York, the software vendor formally detailed its Windows HPC Server 2008 software, a high-performance computing version of Windows offering some features that may appeal to bailout-seeking financial services firms.

First, the new release -- the successor to Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 technology -- will do far less damage to corporate bottom lines than bad subprime mortgages have inflicted. HPC Server 2008, which can scale from two to 2,000 or more server nodes, costs $475 per node, with each consisting of between one and four processor sockets.

Second, HPC Server 2008 includes new management and diagnostics functionality designed to improve the ability of systems administrators to identify performance issues, such as system latency and its root causes. The software also is integrated with desktop applications; for instance, a user working in Excel can send a processing job to an HPC cluster with just one mouse click, similar to what it takes to launch a printing task.

And third, Microsoft said that HPC Server 2008 will enable users to run complex algorithms, such as those used to determine the amount of risk in investment portfolios, in a parallel environment on multiple server cores without having to rewrite their application code.

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