SGI to ship Altix with M$oft CCS

This morning SGI and Microsoft announced that SGI would begin shipping Altix Xeon systems with Compute Cluster Server 2003 as the OS:

…SGI (Nasdaq: SGIC – News) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT – News) today announced that SGI will offer Microsoft® Windows® Compute Cluster Server 2003 on SGI® Altix® XE cluster systems based on quad-core and dual-core Intel® Xeon® processors. SGI Altix XE cluster systems with Windows Compute Cluster Server will be available beginning in March 2007.

Microsoft’s own marketing positions CCS as the path to supercomputing for non-supercomputing people, and SGI is evidently anticipating that this path may yield profits on the low end, a part of the market they haven’t traditionally been strong in. SGI joins Bull, Tyan, and HP in offering clusters based on CCS.