Last week the Compute Cluster (HPC) group released their Microsoft Compute Cluster Toolpack. (Download Here)

The Toolpack consist out of three tools:

    1. Cluster monitoring tool to visualize the cluster utilization.
    2. MPIPingPong.exe to verify if all the nodes and network in the cluster are functional.
    3. A PowerShell snap-in to manage your cluster through PowerShell :)

Here are some examples of how-to use the PowerShell CCS cmdlet and provider:

First of all to get into the cluster you need to use the "cd ccp:" command.

PS c:\> cd ccp:
PS ccp:\> dir nodes
Name Status Proc Idle
---- ------ ---- ----
HPCSRV-Node01 Pending ...
HPCSRV-Node02 Ready .... 
HPCSRV-Node03 Ready .... 
HPCSRV-Node04 Ready .... 

Lets now look which jobs are running in the cluster:

PS ccp:\> dir jobs

96 CCP\USER1 Job 1 Failed Normal


This command uses the Get-Node cmdlet to list all of the nodes under the head
node.

PS ccp:\jobs> get-node
Name Status Proc Idle
---- ------ ---- ----
HPCSRV-Node01 Pending ...
HPCSRV-Node02 Pending ...
HPCSRV-Node03 Pending ...
HPCSRV-Node04 Pending ...

There are many others things you could do like look into which task is running in a particular job, starting, pausing nodes etc..

It's just great to see that more and more product teams are writing cmdlets for PowerShell. Personally I think we should ask the product teams to deliver cmdlets or a provider for PowerShell each time they release a new products. The same is true today for the Management Packs we use in Operations Manager.