Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the availability of the release candidate of Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) 2003. The release candidate milestone signifies that the product code has met certain quality and performance goals, and is suitable for production deployment by early adopter customers and partners. Currently, more than 30 customers are using Windows CCS 2003 to solve complex computational problems. 

Windows CCS 2003 is designed to help customers accelerate time-to-insight by providing a reliable high-performance computing platform that is simple to deploy, operate, and integrate with existing infrastructure and tools. It incorporates the following capabilities:

• Prescriptive setup procedures simplify network configuration, remote loading of nodes using Remote Installation Services, node configuration and security setup. 
• The integrated Job Scheduler can be accessed via command-line interface, or through several APIs provided for submitting and managing cluster workloads.
• The job console allows customers to manage jobs in much the same fashion that they would queue and manage print jobs. 
• Active Directory integration provides end-to-end user and security management, while the Microsoft Management Console supports extensible snap-ins and integration with Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. 
• Visual Studio 2005 allows developers to leverage their existing Windows-based skills when developing "massively parallel" applications and "embarrassingly parallel" applications.

Microsoft's offering is poised to compete with Linux-based cluster management software in the rapidly growing HPC cluster market. According to the company, Windows CCS 2003 is on target to be released to manufacturers by the end of June.