In an attempt to capture a piece of the growing supercomputer industry, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates recently revealed plans to begin selling a new version of Windows built for clustering. The software will be called Compute Cluster Server 2003, according to MSNBC.
The announcement was made at an industry convention in Seattle named Supercomputing 2005. Microsoft will release the software by June of 2006, and a beta version has already been released.
Supercomputing was once associated with large mainframes that were customized for a particular application. However, advances in grid computing now allow groups of cheap computers to be run in parallel to solve a single problem. Intel estimates that within one year 85 percent of personal computers will use multiple processors, and by 2007 it will stop producing single-core chips.
