Windows NT 6.0 details emerge

Mired in delays with Windows NT 5.0, Microsoft officials have nonethelessbegun planning for a future 6.0 version of the operating system. The planis for Windows NT 6.0 to span the gamut from handheld devices to the mostpowerful supercomputers on the planet. Edmund Muth, Microsoft group productmanager for Windows NT, said that NT 6.0--or features currently planned forthat release--would be made available "over the next two to three years."For the most part, the company is concerned with scaling up, not down.

"Clustering and SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] will get much more intertwined technologically, so that there will be boxes that, from some points of view, one might think of them as clusters and some might think ofthem as SMP machines," Muth said. "One of our big interests is to provide aricher system infrastructure around and through clustering."

A future release of Microsoft Cluster Server will be tuned for parallelprocessing so that Windows NT applications can be partitioned over multipleservers.

"Once you have that base in place, in the operating system and the SQL Server, you can scale to extraordinary levels and make partitioning more granular and throw hardware at [computing tasks]," Muth said. "The objective here is to put a layer of software abstraction to insulate the application developer from the underlying platforms.