This morning, I had the pleasure of speaking with Unisys at the launching of their new ES 7000 server at the JW Marriot. Once again, it's an amazing offering for those customers with workloads (high memory utilization etc..) suited to scaling up their applications on Windows. A few times throughout the day I heard the term, “Windows mainframe” tossed around as a point of reference for those from the *nix community. I like the term; I'm smiling to myself now thinking about it.

For my breif slot of 30 mins, I chose to focus on Windows as a HPC (High Performance Computing) platform, which was particualrly relevant for me, as, having just returned from Cornell University in New York State and touched the worlds largest Windows supercomputer (check out the list, the Cornell Theory Center cluster is currently 68), I thought it interesting to share with the audience how supercomputing on Windows is very doable and real right here, right now, today. At the end of my sessions, I gave the following URL, http://www.microsoft.com/hpc as the single, most imporant take away of my session, and there was suddenly vigorous taking of notes in the audience.

Afterwards, mixing with customer and partners alike, they were all amazed, well, more shell-shocked I think, that we have been able to do this on Windows for years, and that this was a reality for the platform. I suddenly had a bunch of very wide-eyed, excited parcipants with many, many questions along the lines of, “are you really sure you guys have been doing this - I never knew!”. Well, it's kinda our fault too; Windows supercomputing is exactly well publicized by us, unless you're already in the HPC circles, but I'm trying to change that, at least within Malaysia, and with events like todays, I can't help getting swept away with the excitement of customers when they discover that they can now tackle the BIG computing problems on Windows.