Microsoft issues HPC, web server challenge to Linux | The Register

Microsoft issues HPC, web server challenge to Linux The Register
Microsoft has taken its battle against Linux and open source a notch higher with a first beta of its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition operating system for high-performance computing (HPC), and a modular version of its IIS web server.
Bob Muglia senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows server division, announcing the Windows beta at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) positioned the operating system as an integrated alternative to Linux in HPC.
[Open source] applications are not integrated into companies' Linux environments. They are built on one off environments so there's no consistency... there are real support issues," Muglia told Windows diehards.
Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition will cluster at least four, eight, 32 and 64 machines, Muglia claimed, with the ability to run jobs across different machines with different requirements and memory demands. "Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition is targeted at intensive environments," Muglia said.
Microsoft has recognized that it is trailing Linux in HPC and Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, due in 2006, is designed to close the gap. While acceptance of the Linux threat is new, Microsoft has been chipping away at clustering since the late 1990s, when Windows 2000 - then Windows NT 5.0 - was on the drawing board.
In a second stab at open source, Microsoft on Wednesday handed out its first developer release of the next version of IIS. IIS 7.0, part of the Longhorn Server due in 2007, has dumped the web server's monolithic architecture for an Apache-style, modular approach.
By going modular, developers can quickly add and remove services and launch their web server without rebooting. Also gone is the IIS metabase, which stored all of IIS's configuration data and required machine-level skills to change or fix.
"The monolithic nature of IIS which has been a total pain for people to build applications has been replaced," Muglia said. Product unit manager Bill Staples, also speaking at PDC, added IIS 7.0 was "molded on the kind of modularity Apache is known for"