Bill Hilf, GM, Microsoft Technical Computing

Microsoft has been quietly building a team of hundreds of people with the mission of giving the world's scientists and engineers the ability to develop and work with complex models of natural and manmade systems much more quickly and easily than they can today.

"It's one of the largest-growth teams in the company right now, and overall one of the biggest bets that we're making strategically," said Bill Hilf, a Microsoft general manager working on the Technical Computing initiative.

The company released the first details of the initiative in an article on its website this afternoon. It also launched an associated site, at www.modelingtheworld.com. The company says real-time scientific modeling could help society understand and address some of the world's biggest environmental and global health problems.

[Previously on TechFlash: Microsoft's new ecosystem: Earth]

As part of the Technical Computing initiative, Microsoft says it's developing a technology platform that will help developers build desktop applications that can tap into large volumes of data and easily harness powerful computers in server clusters and data centers. In addition, the company is developing a new set of technical computing services for its Azure cloud-computing system, to help scientists make better use of the company's worldwide data centers.

The team is also working on ways of developing software better tuned for machines with multiple processors, or computing cores.

In all of those ways, the group is implementing many of the principles that have been championed in recent years by Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer and one of two executives who took over Bill Gates' technical duties following the Microsoft chairman's retirement from day-to-day duties at the company.

Elements of the approach will be reflected in upcoming releases of Microsoft's Visual Studio and Windows High Performance Computing Server programs.

Microsoft isn't releasing a specific product roadmap beyond that, but Hilf said the group's work will start to become apparent in the company's next fiscal year (which starts in July) with a series of demos, betas and previews that will illustrate an "end-to-end, desktop-to-cloud experience for technical computing."

Beyond saying that the Technical Computing team numbers in the hundreds, Hilf declined to say how many people the group has brought on through outside hiring and internal transfers. He noted that Microsoft Research is heavily involved in the project.