A major challenge for realizing personal supercomputing has been the complexity of deployment and management. Microsoft has supported fault-tolerant and high-availability clustering for many years, but with the release of Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003, Microsoft brings the supercomputing power of high-performance computing (HhPC) to the personal and workgroup level. CCS provides an integrated application platform for developing, deploying, running, and managing HhPC applications. Uusing this platform, individuals and organizations can perform multimode workload computing using commodity x64 (64-bit x86) hardware in an environment that will shorten their time to insight.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 brings together the power of commodity x64 computers, the ease of use and security of Aactive Ddirectory, and the Windows operating system to provide a secure and affordable HPC solution. CCS can be easily and quickly deployed using standard Windows deployment technologies, and additional compute nodes can be added to the compute cluster by simply plugging in the nodes and connecting them. The Microsoft Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation is fully compatible with the reference MPICH2. Integration with Ddirectory helps enable role-based security for administration and users, and the use of Microsoft Management Console provides a familiar administrative and scheduling interface. Aadditionally, Microsoft Vvisual Studio® 2005 development system includes support for parallel job development and debugging.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is available to OEMs who want to build and develop compute-intensive solutions quickly and easily by leveraging a set of well-supported application programming interfaces (AaPIs) and protocol interfaces.

DEVICE TYPE EXAMPLES:

• Aircraft design utilizing composite materials
  
• Vehicle fuel efficiency and safety improvements
  
• Simulations of enzyme catalysis, protein folding
  
• Simulation of nanoscale electronic devices
  
• Financial portfolio risk modeling
  
• Digital content creation and enhancement
  
• Supply chain modeling and optimization