c|net News.com is reporting that Microsoft will begin producing a version of Windows for “high performance” supercomputers, such as those running at Lawrence Livermore.

High-performance computing once required massive, expensive, exotic machines from companies such as Cray, but the field is being remade by the arrival of clusters of low-end machines. While the trend could be considered an opportunity for Microsoft, which has long been the leading operating-system company, Linux has actually become the favored software used on these clusters.

Now Microsoft has begun its response, forming its High Performance Computing team and planning a new OS version called Windows Server HPC Edition. Kyril Faenov is director of the effort, and Microsoft is hiring new managers, programmers, testers and others.

Am I the only one who remembers Microsoft’s foray into pen computing in the late 80s/early 90s? They produced a barely-working version of Windows 3.1 with pen input features for the sole purpose of driving startup GO out of the market and out of business. Once done, the initiative was quietly abandoned. In this case, though, these high-performance clustered machines are quite happily running various flavors of Unix and/or Linux, and I can’t imagine the engineers responsible for these machines deigning to let Microsoft crash (yes) the party.