Microsoft launches high-performance computing push

The Microsoft Technical Computing Initiative includes several new areas of focus for the company

Microsoft has kicked off a campaign to promote its high-performance computing (HPC) and technical modelling applications.

Bob Muglia, servers and tools president at Microsoft, explained in an open letter that the Microsoft Technical Computing Initiative will push HPC for modelling applications in areas such as engineering, biomedicine and financial services.

"We have made great strides in our ability to build these kinds of computer models, and yet they are still too difficult, expensive and time consuming to manage," he wrote.

"Today, even the most complicated data-rich simulations cannot fully capture all of the intricacies and dependencies of the systems they are trying to model. "

The Technical Computing Initiative includes several new areas of focus for Microsoft. The company plans to boost efforts in the high-performance cloud computing space, optimise software for parallel computing, and develop tools to improve the collection and processing of data for HPC systems.

"New advances provide the foundation for tools and applications that will make technical computing more affordable and accessible where mathematical and computational principles are applied to solve practical problems," wrote Muglia.

"One day soon, complicated tasks like building a sophisticated computer model that would typically take a team of advanced software programmers months to build and days to run, will be accomplished in a single afternoon by a scientist, engineer or analyst working at the PC on their desktop."