I am getting behind in my blogging: I missed the second day of the eScience event, took most of Friday off and went camping with my family.
What a beautiful weekend!
Here is the start of my (short) wrap-up to the event.
Marvin Theimer, architect for the new offering (I believe it is now called Compute Cluster Server) from the Microsoft HPC group, stood in for Kryil Faenov to talk about Microsoft’s view of the changes coming in the HPC industry. For version 1.0, they seem to be more and more focused on what they called the “personal supercomputer.” – an 8 or 16-node cluster in a single box complete with a dedicated head-node loaded with applications specific to a particular vertical. Think the Apple Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics.
I think this is a reasonable place for them to focus: there certainly is a market for this pre-packaged hardware / software solution.