Somehow the terms "High Performance Computing" and "Excel Spreadsheets" should never appear in the same article.
Clustering is perhaps the area Windows is most UN-suited to. While I can see doing research to keep up in the field, the fact is Linux is so popular in clusters because it's free-as-in-beer. No one that runs a cluster center is going to drop Linux when switching to a Windows cluster will additionally cost them a license fee for each and every copy on each node. Beowulf clusters caught on in the first place because researchers realized they could get supercomputer performance by adding a bunch of pc caliber servers together to act as one machine, without having to pay license fees for each machine's OS.
When Microsoft talks about "High-Performance Computing" they really mean that it 'Blue Screens' faster than anything you've ever seen before. Now, they'll have entire clusters with a BSoD; it's actually quite impressive in a sick and twisted sort of way.
Microsoft has also developed its own job scheduler and message-passing interface (MPI) layer, built using de facto standard open-source code.
Here Microsoft is using Open Source software to reduce their time to market, lower development costs, an expand into new areas.
Meanwhile they spend a lot of money trying to convince their customers that Open Source is a really bad idea that should avoided at all costs.
Priced comparibly to Linux? Then they should just give it away because the majority of the HPC community uses ROCKS (which is free). As for schedulers they use Condor, SGE or LSF. They will not port their scheduler scripts to some unknown Microcrap scheduler. Why fix it if it doesn't break?
1) Microsoft can't beat Linux's price for HPC. Even $50 a piece adds up when you have 1,000 boxes. $50,000 more for what benefit?
2) Microsoft can't make it as easy as Apple has to set up and manage a cluster. Right now you can get HPC cluster systems out-of-the-box from Apple for relatively cheap (ready-to-go 16-node 32-proc starts at $60K with support), and be running HPC applications with little knowledge of clustering.
3) The only place where this might be wanted is those few places that for some reason put huge amounts of data and calculations on Excel spreadsheets. Any Excel spreadsheet that can't be quickly calculated by a modern fast Opteron system needs its data to be put in a different format.
To be rapidly followed by the WCFS (Windows Compute FusterCluck Server)
There is no denying this, but that has allowed potential US adversaries to quickly build up supercomputer capability when they used to have to dream of getting those systems illegally.
But, since some in the US known as the open source crowd are obviously willing to literally GIVE this type of software away to our potential enemies for free. Thankfully at least some others in the US are at least trying to make a dollar on it.
I don't want any technology of this caliber leaving the country, but if it does, giving it away for free seems the most absurd. This is the exact type of technology we should be keeping from Iran. Hopefully Microsoft will encrypt their technology, and deliver the best product on the market.