The Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing was created in November 2005 at the University of Southampton.
[1] In 2006 Microsoft was working on a proof-of-concept implementation of a bespoke engineering workflow software for BAE Systems.
The large British aerospace company wanted to run its SOLAR software on the Microsoft Cluster Server.
The teams at the University of Southampton, BAE Systems and Microsoft managed to build a demonstrator in just 3 weeks.
[2] The institute has conducted research in: Microsoft Visual Studio's Product Manager Dennis Crain referring to the MIHPC in Southampton said: [3] "It's an exciting opportunity to have a top engineering school such as Southampton use Microsoft software to solve tough engineering research problems.