Microsoft Germany's fastest-yet homegrown supercomputer, running the U.S. company's new Windows HPC Server 2008, on June 18 debuted in the top 25 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers, as tested by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The German-built supercomputer ranked at No. 23 in the world with a problem-solving performance of 68.5 teraflops. The announcement was made June 18 at the International Supercomputing conference in Dresden.

The NCSA used the beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 to reach the  68.5-teraflop (68.5 trillion floating point operations per second) level. It runs on commodity hardware and reported 77.7 percent application efficiency on 9,472 cores, making this facility one of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world and the fastest Windows cluster to date.

Most of the cores were made up of Intel Xeon quad-core chips. Storage for the system was about 6 terabytes.

"When we deployed Windows on our cluster, which has more than 1,000 nodes, we went from bare metal to running the LINPACK benchmark programs in just four hours," said Robert Pennington, deputy director of the NCSA.

"The performance of Windows HPC Server 2008 has yielded efficiencies that are among the highest we've seen for this class of machine."

Microsoft announced that the final release candidate version of Windows HPC Server 2008 will be available for download during the last week of June.

Key features of Windows HPC Server 2008 include: high-speed networking; new, scalable cluster management tools; advanced failover capabilities; a service-oriented architecture (SOA) job scheduler; and support for clustered file systems from some of Microsoft partners.

A lot of people don't know this, but Microsoft, which got rich producing PC operating systems and applications, has been investing heavily in research and development in high-performance computing for about the last eight years.

In fact, the world's largest software company currently employs hundreds of engineers whose sole job it is to conceptualize and develop new products for the burgeoning HPC market, which research company IDC reports is the fast-growing sector in IT at 19.5 percent per year.

According to IDC, over the next five years the HPC server market is projected to show healthy, steady growth. The researcher expects revenue for the total HPC server market to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 9.2 percent to reach $18 billion by 2012.