As Microsoft loses traction to Linux in the clustered or big iron server space, the firm has tweaked the Vista kernel for Windows 7 to support 256 parallel CPUs.

In a feat of engineering, the Microsoft team has managed to break a developmental roadblock that even baffled David Cutler, father of the NT kernel. The roadblock, known as a dispatcher lock, describes how processing tasks in the pipeline for computation are queued and addressed.

The current dispatcher lock model describes two states for tasks known as “waiting” or “running.” The current model has struggled with scalability because an abundance of idle tasks has tended to gum up the works and consume memory space. By revamping the lock to add a third state dubbed “pre-waiting,” more tasks can be addressed in parallel without the computational traffic jam.

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