I am pleased to announce the start of the HPC Pack 2012 Beta Program!

The 4th major version of our HPC software line following the Compute Cluster Pack, HPC Pack 2008, and HPC Pack 2008 R2 releases, the HPC Pack 2012 release brings a batch of new functionality and support for new software.

  • Windows Server 2012 (including 'Server Core'), the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and Windows 8 are all now supported
  • A single version of HPC Pack 2012 now includes all the functionality that used to be split across the HPC Pack 2008 Express, Enteprise, Workstations and Cycle Harvesting editions
  • HPC Pack now supports extending your enterprise network to Windows Azure via 'Project Brooklyn'
  • MS-MPI has a new 'message compression' feature to reduce the time spent waiting on communications to complete
  • The job scheduler now allows for dependencies between jobs (in addition to the task dependencies that already existed) to better integrate with your work flow
  • Windows Azure nodes can be set to automatically mount a VHD, which could contain some static data or application code, to make using HPC Pack's 'burst' functionality even easier
  • and more... A more complete list of new functionality is available once you join the beta :)

 

Sign up for the beta program by going to the Microsoft HPC Connect beta site, logging in with your Windows Live ID and filling out a quick survey. (If this is your first Connect-based beta program you'll also need to complete a short set of 'profile' questions.)