PDC Round up, WCG Style

I know there have been about 10,000 PDC roundups posted so far (how long until the bloggers outnumber the non-bloggers at an event like this?), but I thought I'd write a post to talk about how the various Microsoft products announced affect grid computing, West Coast style.

Windows Workflow Foundation
Workflow has a slightly different meaning in distributed computing than it does in enterprise computing. Often, workflow in enterprises has a lot of human interaction (an order generates an e-mail, it needs to be approved by a manager, the order is forwarded to the warehouse, etc). In distributed computing, it tends to have more to do with the interdependencies between tasks in a jobs and jobs themselves. Paul Andrew, the Technical Product Manager for WWF, has a post here that has all of the WWF presentations from PDC. I'm going to look those over tonight and tomorrow; I look forward to knowing more about this.

Windows Server 2003R2
Bob Muglia provided details on this release, which will be out this year. In addition to .NET 2.0 and WSE 3.0 (which we already knew about), this release is going to include MMC 3.0--and this will enable managed code snap-ins to MMC. Having managed code snap-ins opens a world of opportunity; we'll have to consider whether we want to hop on that bandwagon.

Compute Cluster Solution: CCE + CCP = CCS
This was our first hands-on experience with Microsoft's toolkit; it was great to play with it in the lab. It was also good to hear them explain CCE/CCS/CCP (Compute Cluster Edition is the OS [which is complete], Compute Cluster Pack is the toolkit, and Compute Cluster Solution is the combination of the two). CCS is going to put Microsoft into square competition against linux in scientific computing (which has largely been ceded to linux solutions to this point). I can't wait for this to come out; Microsoft's success in HPC can only help us. Of course, by the time CCS is released commercially (2006Q2), Digipede will already be a leader in enterprise distributed computing.

ISV Chalk Talk
Am I really excited about the existence of a new blog? I am. Because whenever Microsoft announces more support for ISVs, I think it's a great idea.

There really is a bunch more. I'm going to have to make this (at least) two posts.