Microsoft wants to improve its share of the super computer market and the company has created an effort called the Technical Computing Initiative focused on the field of high-performance computing.

Microsoft has quietly staffed up the group with several hundred employees and is launching a marketing push with a new website touting trends in high-performance computing. Most punters don't need much computer performance but high-performance machines are the key to the design of a lot of everyday products.

Microsoft has been a bit player in the super computer market. According to Top500, a website that tracks trends among the 500 most powerful computer systems, more than 89 per cent of supercomputers ran on the Linux operating system as of November, while only a single percent ran on Microsoft’s Windows.

Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft’s server and tools business, said high-performance computing is still far too complicated for even many technical people to learn. His cunning plan is to make this computing power available to everyone.

For example many financial services firms use the company’s Excel spreadsheet application to develop financial models. But if the firms need the power of a supercomputer to crunch numbers, they have to use Fortran.

Microsoft’s Technical Computing group is working on software that will allow a program like Excel to run in parallel on thousands of machines so the application can be used to tackle monster financial computing chores on its own.