On May 2, Microsoft made available to testers a beta build of the second service pack (SP2) for its coming Windows Server High Performance Computing (HPC) 2008 R2 platform.
What makes this interesting is HPC 2008 R2 SP2 is the slated delivery vehicle for Dryad, Microsoft’s closest competitor to Google MapReduce and Apache Hadoop. In the early phase of its existence, Dryad was a Microsoft Research project dedicated to developing ways to write parallel and distributed programs that can scale from small clusters to large datacenters.
