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Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) runs on a group of interconnected computers that collectively tackle calculation chores. These high-performance computing clusters have swept the list of the top 500 supercomputers — but typically they run Linux, not Windows.

When Microsoft released Windows CCS less than a year ago, the company tried to find a new niche in the market rather than go up against Linux directly. The software giant is trying to win over customers with small clusters, often integrated with the work customers are doing on their Windows PCs.

"We think that's fertile ground that nobody else has hoed yet," said Gartner analyst John Enck. "We were pretty sceptical when they came to market with this, but they're doing much better than we anticipated."

Microsoft has had some successes moving from a market in which it's strong into an adjacent market where it's not. For example, Microsoft moved from operating system software to desktop software, and from Windows on PCs to Windows on servers.

Lateral move

That's exactly what happened in the case of the South Florida Water Management District, which is using Windows CCS to power a modest-size five-server cluster that computes water flow to as part of a multibillion-dollar habitat restoration project in the Everglades National Park.

The group also has a much larger Linux cluster, but the group also had Windows-based modelling tools that they moved easily to the cluster, said Akin Owosina, programme manager for the district's Interagency Modeling Center.

Another customer is the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which is running Windows CCS on a 16-server cluster for research in transportation and in cancer-related molecular modelling.

Microsoft gives itself high marks for its results so far. "We acknowledge we have more work to do here, but we've made good progress in the first year," said Shawn Hansen, Microsoft's director of HPC (high-performance computing) marketing. "We've been very pleased with the results and the uptake."

New features

Windows CCS isn't Microsoft's last crack at the market, though. It just released Service Pack 1, which is based on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2. That new version makes it possible to bring up a cluster in one fell swoop rather than installing software on each machine individually.

More significant changes will come with CCS version 2, Hansen said, which will be based on the "Longhorn Server" successor to Windows Server 2003. Longhorn Server is due to ship this year, but Hansen declined to say when the CCS revamp will emerge.