Addressing the Supercomputing 2005 conference in Seattle, Gates spoke to a crowd that makes scant use of the Microsoft operating system in high-performance systems. Gates sought to cross that divide by stressing the common problems of what he called mass computing and supercomputing.

"Many of these challenges that we face in software -- connecting machines together, having parallel algorithms that allow many compute systems to work on a problem and combine their results together -- these problems are very similar to the problems that exist in high-end supercomputing," said Gates.

"Its exciting to think that we can get the best brains from supercomputing and from mass computing and bring those together and make great progress in the decade ahead," he said.

Windows barely registers a pulse in high-end computing. On the latest Top500 supercomputing list, released this week, the breakdown by operating systems has Linux running nearly 75 percent of the top 500 systems; Unix has 20 percent, and Mac OS X is listed at 1 percent. Windows isn't noted at all.

"It is astonishing how they missed out on this altogether," said John Abbott, an analyst at The 451 Group in New York, referring to Microsoft's limited role in high-end technical computing. It's important for Microsoft to be recognized in the high-end market "because that's where half these technologies, like grid and clustering, are all being proven," he said.