IBM offers low entry point to Microsoft's HPC Server 2008

The so-called test drives will be provided through IBM's Computing on Demand facilities.

Microsoft announced today that HPC Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing, and said that it was firmly pitching it at large firms looking for an easy-to-deploy, cost-effective and scalable high-performance computing product.

However, IBM will look to offer the release to smaller firms.

IBM said that its cloud computing services will be the virtual platform for the trials, and that it will offer Windows HPC Server 2008 test drive in units of 14 to 16 nodes on IBM BladeCenter or System x servers featuring Intel Xeon multi-core processors.

The trial is expected to be taken up by companies that desire high levels of computing power, but do not have the resources to deal with them.

“With the Computing on Demand facility, Microsoft and IBM are delivering supercomputing performance to companies that could previously not afford it or never had access to it,” said Vince Mendillo, director of high performance computing marketing at Microsoft.

IBM will also make its 3-D visualisation engine - Deep Computing Visualization (DCV)- available through the cloud, and has plans to introduce a new look web portal interface and a number of other administration features.

It said that here automation tools would 'help ensure authorised resources are dynamically provisioned into a secure virtual LAN for the client to access at the committed start time, significantly streamlining the on-demand process'.