Supercomputers on Wall Street - Sinclair Spectrums all round?

As badly-timed new software announcements go, launching a high performance computing (HPC) package on Wall Street has to be up there – or does it?

Well, the guys from Redmond have extensively trailed this launch, with a release candidate of HPC Server 2008 being unveiled at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany.

At the ISC in June, Microsoft was shouting from the rooftops that it had broken into the top 25 of the world's top 500 most powerful supercomputers, with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) system being ranked number 23 in the “Hot 500”.

The reason Microsoft is on Wall Street today is that financial services appear to be one of the hot markets for HPC. You can well imagine the advantage of being able to program your supercomputer to tip you the wink when the firm is about to go belly up – or even better, six months before the firm goes belly up.

In its press release, Microsoft has customer Morgan Stanley espousing the virtues of HPC. However, had it not been for that well-known socialist George W. Bush intervening and basically nationalising half the US banking infrastructure, then Morgan Stanley might have been rolling out HPC Server 2008 on a cluster of second-hand Sinclair Spectrums.

By Dave Bailey