Clustering is perhaps the area Windows is most UN-suited to. While I can see doing research to keep up in the field, the fact is Linux is so popular in clusters because it's free-as-in-beer. No one that runs a cluster center is going to drop Linux when switching to a Windows cluster will additionally cost them a license fee for each and every copy on each node. Beowulf clusters caught on in the first place because researchers realized they could get supercomputer performance by adding a bunch of pc caliber servers together to act as one machine, without having to pay license fees for each machine's OS.
"Clustering is perhaps the area Windows is most UN-suited to."
That and HPC in general. HPC wants efficient, tight code with as few resources devoted to the OS as possible. That is the antithesis of Microsoft software development practices.
Linux is much better in that regard.