[Beowulf] Microsoft is coming to get ya

[Leif Nixon]

Hmmm.

According to <http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2042>, Steve
Ballmer said yesterday:

    I think we have four big opportunities to take business from Linux
    and we will. And again, why would we take it. Because people will
    take a look at the tools and the technologies we put in the
    marketplace and decide that they deliver better results at a lower
    cost. What's the first? High performance clustering. High
    performance clusters is a thing that has been a Linux stronghold.
    It's about 20 percent of all Linux systems. We're coming out with
    a compute cluster edition of Windows Server. We're coming out with
    new development tools that help people write applications that
    make sense in that kind of scientific computing environment.

And it's true, they do seem to be gathering their strength. At least
in Europe, Microsoft has quietly been recruiting prominent HPC and
grid computing people for a while.

This is going to be interesting, I think.

-- 
Leif Nixon                       -            Systems expert
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National Supercomputer Centre    -      Linkoping University
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