SC06 Itanium believer Bull has popped up as the latest hardware vendor to support a cluster-friendly version of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Customers can now purchase Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003 for Bull's NovaScale R400 clusters. While much of Bull's server efforts center on Itanium, the clusters in question actually run on Intel's Xeon chips. Bull joins HP as a recent Windows CCS supporter.

Only Microsoft could launch a "2003" operating system in 2006 after having spent the last 18 months or so hawking beta versions of Windows CCS. The software maker hopes to crack the high performance computing market that has been dominated by Linux clusters.

The task, however, won't be easy.

Windows CCS has thus far appeared on a limited number of rather small clusters – not the multi-thousand processor systems that garner the most attention. ®

Related stories

• Does HP have $1bn worth of Bull? (26 July 2007)
• Bull delivers 16 cores in pizza box (4 May 2007)
• Bull goes industrial with software factory (20 April 2007)
• Penguin lays an Opteron low-ender (10 January 2007)
• SC06 Startup takes Reg's coveted 'Top FLOP' award (20 November 2006)
• SC06 Educators boost US tech fortunes with cheap cluster (19 November 2006)
• SC06 Evergrid ships 'little blue pill' for clusters (16 November 2006)
• SC06 Customers take Microsoft clusters seriously – true (14 November 2006)
• Le Misancalculation: A one act Itanium tragedy by IDC (17 February 2006)
• Brit Prof will oversee Microsoft for EC (5 October 2005)
• Itanium goes clubbing (2 September 2005)