Technical Computing

Modeling the World

Today, Microsoft announced our Technical Computing initiative.

Through the Technical Computing initiative, we will enable scientists, engineers and analysts to more easily model the world at much greater fidelity. The Technical Computing initiative will address a wide range of users. One of the most critical elements is to help developers create applications that can take advantage of parallelism on their desktop, in a cluster, and in public and private clouds.

The Technical Computing initiative builds on investments and inroads we’re already making in areas like simplifying parallel programming. For example, Visual Studio 2010 contains the Parallel Patterns Library, user level tasks, a parallel debugger and profiler, and other tools. These features enable the developer to extract maximum performance from multicore and many-core systems. You can learn more about some of our parallel developer features in my recent blog post.

For those building multi-core and many-core applications for Windows HPC Server, the highly-tuned Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation allows developers to create applications that span multiple systems, and Visual Studio supports debugging MPI applications as well.

As with everything we do, partners are an essential part of our solution, and the challenge of parallelism is no different. The leading tools in the industry are part of the Visual Studio ecosystem. For example, NVIDIA’s Parallel Nsight allows the developer to debug and analyze codes running on GPUs and Intel’s Parallel Studio lets developers extract full performance from multicore systems.

To better understand our vision and get more details, you can read the announcement.

We’re also bringing together some of the brightest minds in the technical computing community across industry, academia, and science at www.ModelingTheWorld.com to discuss trends, challenges and shared opportunities. If you are interested in this space, I invite you to tune in and join the conversation.

Namaste!