The supercomputer is coming to your desk

Just as Wall Street was facing financial meltdown, Microsoft turned up at the 2008 High Performance on Wall Street conference with the idea of using Windows for what we used to call supercomputing. The event marked the RTM (release to manufacturing) of the latest HPC (high performance computing) version of Windows Server 2008, and followed the launch of a cheap Cray CX1 supercomputer designed to run it. In a business where machines can cost $100m, "cheap" starts at around $25,000. Other machines will follow from companies such as HP, IBM and Dell . This doesn't mean Microsoft expects to take over the supercomputing business, where Linux has something like a 95% market share. Very few real supercomputers run Windows, though one recently established a top-25 benchmark performance of 68.5 teraflops. (Actually it was a Linux... [read full story]