November's Less Noticed Version Of WindowsNovember's Less Noticed Version Of Windows

Much of the computer industry's attention this past week has been turned on Windows Vista, Microsoft's new desktop operating system. CEO Steve Ballmer raised the curtain on that product Nov. 30 in New York. Since about 800 million of the world's PCs run Windows, the software's release is profound, not only for Microsoft and its customers, but for the hundreds of hardware and software companies in Windows' economic orbit.

Possibly overlooked in the run-up to Vista's launch was another November conference in the less media-centric city of Tampa, Fla. At an annual supercomputing conference the week of Nov. 13, Microsoft showed new demos of its Windows Compute Cluster Server, a high-performance computing version of Windows capable of running on as many as 200 servers.Windows runs on about 90% of the world's desktops, and Microsoft has made strong inroads into the server market, too. But so far the company's software has been mostly a no-show for scientific and technical apps used in academia, research, and industry. But Windows for supercomputing is slowly gaining adherents. The software shipped in August, and according to Microsoft's estimate is installed on 3% of the x86 servers that computer vendors ship into the high-performance computing market--a rapidly growing market sector that's nearly all Linux. That's a decent start in a market where nearly all researchers' app are written for Unix variants.

Microsoft's approach is predicated on the idea that scientists want to begin prototyping numerical models on their desktops, then ship the computations to a cluster for the heavy computational work, while staying within one software environment. "By focusing on the bottom end, we can make [supercomputing] easier to use and more accessible," says Tony Hey, Microsoft's corporate VP for technical computing.

Hey, a former director of the United Kingdom's scientific computing initiative and a fellow of Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering, joined Microsoft last year. Within the past year the company also has hired Fabrizio Gagliardi, a former top technical manager at the European particle physics institute CERN, and Burton Smith, a former technical executive at Cray. The engineering teams for Windows Compute Cluster reside in Redmond, Wash., and Shanghai.

At the Tampa supercomputing show, Microsoft engineers demonstrated a Windows cluster modeling a bond portfolio running in Excel, calculating the instruments' future value based on changes in interest rates. By calculating the value of each bond on a separate node in the cluster, the application, which Microsoft built with Cornell University, was able to achieve linear acceleration and fail-over capabilities.

It's the kind of demo Microsoft needs to show the value of its software stack. High-end versions of the company's Office 2007 suite, which also shipped Nov. 30, contain Excel Services, a server-side version of Microsoft's spreadsheet program that can run on a cluster of Windows machines. Excel's the place where quant jocks live out their days.

Microsoft in Tampa also demonstrated a weather prediction app from the National Center for Atmospheric Research originally written for Unix and Linux machines. The program contains about 360,000 lines of code, and developers ported it to Windows with just 750 lines of code, Microsoft says.

"In the academic area, people are now looking to [Windows] as an alternative to the Linux cluster," says Hey. Still, he qualifies, "It's early days to make grandiose claims like we've won over the scientific community."

As with most technical markets, gaining share in the fast-growing high-performance computing market will require take-notice benchmarks, competitive pricing, and proof that Windows runs the standard apps used in a range of scientific and engineering disciplines. To that end, Microsoft has been working with British and German universities to port codes from the aerospace and automotive industries to Windows, and has projects under way with Porsche, DaimlerChrysler, and Rolls Royce. Here in the United States, the state of Florida is applying Microsoft's cluster software for computer modeling of water management in the Everglades, and Virginia Tech is using high-performance Windows for a computing grid that supports cancer research. In Asia, Microsoft is starting a project with a Tokyo Institute of Technology professor to explore using graphics processors and other accelerator chips to speed up application performance, an area of interest in supercomputing circles.

A year ago, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates told me in an interview that advancing Windows as a platform for supercomputing could pay dividends in consumer and business computing markets that will inherit today's highest-end technology. Principles of clustering and running software across hundreds or thousands of processors will become a foundation of business computing, helping drive the next breakthroughs in science, medicine, product design, and finance. "When we say science, think about people designing cars, think about people designing planes, think about people thinking through the design of a Web site," Gates said.

Microsoft's supercomputing business may be small potatoes today, but its potential effect on broader markets is one reason to pay more attention.