Open Source Code Finds Way into Microsoft Product
In a move that shows just how far Microsoft Corp. has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products.
Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface—a library specification for message passing proposed as a standard by a broad-based committee of vendors, implementers and users—in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, which went to public beta this week at the Microsoft Developers Conference here and is on track to ship in the first half of next year. "MPI is key middleware that was designed by a consortia of all the supercomputing vendors in the 1990s to allow the easy portability of code. It abstracts away things like low-latency interconnect, and our focus is making it super easy for ISVs to move their code," Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's director for High Performance Computing, told eWEEK in a recent interview at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash.
