The last piece of the puzzle for Windows in HPC is Linux interoperability. Although some dual-boot operating system capability has been there in the past, the beta release adds compatibility with mixed-OS cluster management platforms from Adaptive Computing, Clustercorp and Platform Computing. This allows the system admin to statically boot specific nodes with Linux or Windows. In the case of Platform Computing, dynamic OS provisioning can be supported via the company's ISF Adaptive Cluster platform. The whole idea here is to be able to serve Windows and Linux HPC apps on the same hardware, and to do so as transparently as possible. This is a must-have feature for Microsoft, inasmuch as HPC customers have come to expect Linux as the default OS.

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