Windows 7 sale Microsoft finalizes its latest supe

Microsoft has announced instant availability of Windows Superior Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008 R2, its top-of-the line Windows Server operating system, as of September 20.Microsoft currently is functioning on an update to the just-released HPC 2008 R2 platform that can “allow customers to provision and manage HPC nodes in Windows Azure from within on-premises server clusters,” and is planning to demonstrate this capability at the Great Performance Computing Financial Markets Conference in New York today.Company officials are not providing further details about how or when they will make this HPC update available. But they are saying it will help those who want to burst HPC workloads from their on-premises datacenters to the cloud for extra processing power. (I;m thinking we might hear more specifics on this at the Microsoft cloud-focused Professional Developers Conference 2010 in late October….)Microsoft introduced a Beta 1 of the third release of HPC Server, HPC Server 2008 R2,Office 2010 License, in the fall of 2009. Beta 2 hit in April. Release to manufacturing occurred this past summer.New towards the latest HPC release is improved scalability,Microsoft Office 2010 Home And Business, tight integration with Windows 7,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, better Excel integration (via HPC Services for Excel 2010), and better support for cross-platform integration for customers running both HPC Server and Linux,Microsoft Office Pro Plus 2010, Microsoft execs have said. Despite the Linux-interop message, Microsoft;s foremost competitor in the HPC/supercomputing space remains Linux.Microsoft;s HPC platform is one of the main products of Microsoft;s Technical Computing Group,Windows 7 sale, formed in March of this year.