Two years after fielding its first software designed specifically for supercomputers, Microsoft has cracked the top 10 list of the world's fastest machines. Its Windows HPC Server 2008 powers the Shanghai Supercomputer Center's "Dawning 5000A", which was clocked at 180.6 teraflops -- trillions of floating point operations per second -- for the twice-annual TOP500 list of supercomputers.

Cray just announced a $25,000 to $80,000 high-performance computer, the CX1, targeted at a broader market of scientists, business analysts, engineers and others whose data-intensive work increasingly demands more computing horse power. The Seattle super-computer maker is loading the CX1 with Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft's latest high-performance computing operating system. The CX1 is built on Intel Xeon processors.

Microsoft has a couple of interesting high-performance computing events scheduled later this month. It looks as though the company will launch its Windows HPC Server 2008 at a New York event for Wall Street IT people, a key market for the product, on Sept. 22. Before that, the company will make an announcement with Intel and Seattle-based high-performance computing company Cray on Sept. 16.