High-Performance Windows Delayed Until Next YearHigh-Performance Windows Delayed Until Next Year

Microsoft is delaying the release of its high-end "compute cluster" version of Windows until the first half of next year, citing the need for additional development in the areas of management and deployment. The product had been scheduled for release in the second half of 2005.

Windows Server 2003, Compute Cluster Edition, will be aimed at "personal" and departmental applications, not the "extreme scale-up" applications often associated with supercomputing, according to Microsoft.

The company released a software development kit for Compute Cluster Edition, previously known as the Windows Server 2003, High-Performance Computing Edition, late last year. The kit lets partners tune applications to run in the Windows environment. A refreshed toolkit will ship this summer, Microsoft says.

Compute Cluster Edition is based on Windows Server 2003 and will support high-performance hardware and industry standards such as MPI-2 and RDMA over Ethernet and Infiniband, Microsoft said last fall. The system will include an integrated job scheduler and cluster resource management.