Why the blog is of interest:

The demand for grid computing keeps climbing faster in financial circles. Yet Windows faces plenty of entrenched competition in this space from other environments. In the Magmasystems blogspot, however, third-party computing consultant Marc Adler points to some arising technologies that could give Microsoft a big boost in financial grids, including Microsoft Accelerator and the new Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition (CCE).

"It will be nice to get first-class support from Microsoft as far as development tools go," according to the consultant.

Marc bases some of his observations on recent trips to Seattle  --where he met with Microsoft Accelerator team members about the future of their technology -- and to London.  

"The Accelerator team claims that (Accelerator) can be used as an abstraction for multicore technologies. The guys from the Accelerator team also predict that the world will eventually be moving to massively multi-core machines (i.e.: Intel's 80 core processor)," Marc writes in one blog entry.

"Got together (in London) with some ex-colleagues, who were marveling at the London consulting market," he relates in another posting. "The hot area are (in) grid computing, with the prevalent stack being DataSynapse and Tangasol. Also demand is picking up for WPF, with Morgan Stanley leading the way. The daily (consulting) rates for qualified individuals are about 100 pounds, (which) at the current exchange rates is about $2,000.

"It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Cluster Server and (software tools vendor) Digipede can make any inroads into this market. There seems to be very strong bias against using .NET for a grid infrastructure, something which I hope to see turned around in 2007."

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