Gates to bang supercomputing drum

Bill Gates plans on Tuesday to announce Microsoft's foray into the world of supercomputing, though its first operating system for computer clusters remains in beta testing.

Gates is slated to speak at the SC05 supercomputing conference - a first for Microsoft - where he will announce the company has entered Beta-2 testing of its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. The product consists of both a cluster-optimised version of the OS as well as software for job scheduling and other tasks. It is scheduled for release in final form in the first half of next year.

Academic institutions and some industrial customers have been combining clusters of standard AMD- and Intel-based servers for some time. But Microsoft says it has seen a shift where such products expand beyond a niche market into more and more businesses. Microsoft is pitching its tools as on par with the performance of Linux. The company also claims its tools are easier to manage and integrate with the rest of a corporate computing environment.

Kyril Faenov, director of Microsoft's HPC unit, said: "HPC [high performance computing] is starting to broaden out. What that leads to is demand, on behalf of customers, to really provide this raw power in a way that is easier to consume and easier to integrate into what they are already doing."

Microsoft confirmed reports which surfaced last year that it planned a high-performance computing version of Windows.

In March, a Microsoft engineer said the company hoped to have a product out by the autumn, though that turned out to be a beta. The new beta version will be public, unlike the one released at September's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, which was limited to about 1,600 testers.

In addition to announcing the new beta, Microsoft is touting the support it is receiving from hardware makers. The company will outline 19 key applications, from other software makers, which will run on the new version of Windows.

And, Microsoft will announce investments in 10 high-performance computing institutes that will serve as early customers and help the company determine where to go with the cluster-software effort.

Gates is expected to talk about where high-performance computing fits with broader research tasks and about Microsoft's efforts in collaboration, data mining and other areas. He will demonstrate, for example, how life sciences data can be tapped from information stored in the company's just-released SQL Server 2005 and then used by third-party cluster software before ultimately being sent off-site for a large-scale supercomputing task.

Ina Fried writes for CNET News.com