What makes this interesting is HPC 2008 R2 SP2 is the slated delivery vehicle for Dryad, Microsoft’s closest competitor to Google MapReduce and Apache Hadoop. In the early phase of its existence, Dryad was a Microsoft Research project dedicated to developing ways to write parallel and distributed programs that can scale from small clusters to large datacenters.

Earlier this year, Bill Hilf, General Manager of the Technical Computing Group at Microsoft, told me to expect Dryad to be part of HPC 2008 R2 SP2 and to look for the final version of it toward the end of calendar 2011.