Microsoft rolled out its first offering for the powerful computer networks that perform complex tasks for scientists and engineers.

The company said today Compute Cluster Server 2003 was released to manufacturing and will be available in August. It set the price of the software, which is designed to serve the growing high-performance computing market, at about $469 per computing node.

Clusters of nodes joined together to work in parallel are handling data-intensive tasks such as simulating biological experiments or oil and gas reservoir modeling, the company said. This story explores some of the ways Microsoft is wading into the life sciences business, including high performance computing.

Microsoft sees high-performance computing expanding beyond traditional fields such as life sciences, engineering, manufacturing and natural resources exploration.

In a statement, Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business, said "Microsoft is making HPC technology more mainstream by bringing the cost advantages, ease of use and partner ecosystem of the Windows Server platform to departments and divisions in commercial industry and the public sector. We want HPC technology to become a pervasive resource -- something that's as easy to locate and use as printers are today."