Dan Fay writing on Microsoft’s blogging platform has shared news that MS has started a Computational Science Pilot
The Windows HPC team has just made public their Computational Finance Pilot where they are enabling execution of computational finance models for university courses – there is a good paper on the implementation.
Resources include a 256 core cluster with 5 TB of storage. As Dan points out, it would be interesting to do the same sort of thing for science-based apps; the weather community’s fairly standardized model set comes to mind. Of course, Microsoft is probably focusing first on their most likely market for HPC Server.