Speaking at a supercomputing conference in Seattle, Gates announced that the company has reached the Beta 2 stage for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. The product consists of both a cluster-optimized version of Windows Server 2003 as well as software for job scheduling and other tasks. It is scheduled for release in final form in the first half of next year.
"Technical computing is crucial to the many discoveries that impact our quality of life--from making safer, more efficient cars and airplanes to addressing global health issues and environmental changes," Gates said in a statement. "Moreover, most sciences are becoming computational sciences, which is why advanced computing capabilities need to be seamlessly integrated into the end-to-end scientific process."
Separately, Microsoft also announced that the Compute Cluster Server and several other upcoming server software releases will work only with 64-bit processors. Such chips, which include Intel"s 64-bit Xeons and Advanced Micro Devices" Opteron, are becoming the norm on servers, and 64-bit processors are making their way onto desktop machines.