
Redmond said that the deal will bring high-performance cluster computing within reach of organisations that would previously have found it uneconomic.
Björn Tromsdorf, high-performance computing (HPC) product and solution manager at Microsoft EMEA, said: "The combination of Microsoft and Bull allows HPC to be offered as a solution in markets where server clusters would previously have been too complex and expensive to manage and use."
Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 is Microsoft's first software offering designed specifically to run parallel HPC applications.
Bull's HPC experience includes delivering Europe's largest supercomputer at the French Atomic Energy Commission.
The firm's NovaScale R400 is a rack-optimised server offering clock speeds up to 3GHz with a 1,333MHz Front Side Bus.