A new level of the absurd… Windows Vista requires more hardware resources than Microsoft’s Windows for Supercomputers. Yet one operating system is designed to run on home computers while the other is aimed at the high-performance computing (HPC) market. And when it comes to the actual machines, there simply is no contest between the performance delivered by a commercially-available, off-the-shelf PC and a supercomputer.

Super-Windows

With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 Microsoft made the first step into the high-performance computing market, the initial stage in a strategy set up to make HPC a mundane aspect of the commercial mainstream, in the company’s vision. The availability of Windows HPC Server 2008 will be synonymous with the Redmond company gaining ground on parallel supercomputers and computer clusters. Parallel computing represents without a doubt the future direction of evolution for processor architectures, with even Microsoft anticipating the tailoring of the Windows client to multicore infrastructures.

At this point in time the technology is light years away from general consumer implementation, with the market still struggling to move from 32-bit to 64-bit architectures. In fact, Windows 7, the successor of Windows Vista, will continue to be offered in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors in 2010. But perhaps the biggest challenge of a scenario involving the mainstream adoption of multicore CPUs is related to the creation of an ecosystem of software made up of parallel programs that would integrate with the new processors.