“Buried beneath the bland verbiage announcing Microsoft’s Technical Computing Initiative on Monday is some really exciting stuff. As Bill Hilf, Redmond’s general manager of technical computing, explained it to me, Microsoft is bringing burst- and cluster-computing capability to its Windows Azure platform. The upshot is that anyone will be able to access HPC in the cloud. HPC stands for High-Performance Computing. That’s the politically correct acronym for what we used to call supercomputing. Microsoft itself has long offered Windows HPC Server as its operating system in support of highly parallel and cluster-computing systems.” Reported Infromation Week.
Trust me that this is indeed powerful stuff. As Hilf told me in a brief interview: “We’ve been doing HPC Server and selling infrastructure and tools into supercomputing, but there’s really a much broader opportunity. What we’re trying to do is democratize supercomputing, to take a capability that’s been available to a fraction of users to the broader scientific computing.”
