If for some reason you want to uninstall the HPC Pack 2008 R2 software from multiple computers, read on... HPC Pack 2008 R2 is made up of several different components (for example the Client Utilities and the MPI Redistributable) that get installed in different combinations depending on what options...

When you have a cluster with a few hundred nodes, in a network environment that's often beyond your control, running applications that you didn't write, used by users who are not always predictable, you are expected to see some errors most of the time. Troubleshooting and fixing a cluster is hard with...

Whenever I discuss image management capabilities of the HPC Cluster Manager, one question which invariably arises is, “How do I capture an image of a compute node which has been customized so that I can use it as the ‘master’ for deploying to the rest of the nodes?” My response has been to send an email...

We've gotten reports of an installation glitch that makes it so that node management cmdlets won't work when run from a remote client (they'll work just fine run on the headnode) due to a registry key that doesn't always get set up correctly. Fortunately, there is a simple work around! If you are trying...

I just installed the brand new RC1 candidate on my head node. I provisioned all 23 nodes of my cluster at once, using the Default compute node template. While going through the “Create a node template” wizard in the To-Do list, I selected the option “Include a step in the template to download and install...

Dear community, With Windows Server 2008 the product key management has changed over Windows Server 2003 and the default grace period to do the activation is 30 days. This is too few for an full evaluation of a cluster, but this period can be reset up to 3 times extending the overall evaluation...

Hi, I’m Doug and I design & run production Windows Compute Cluster Server clusters for the HPC team at Microsoft. I often get asked “what hardware configuration should I choose for my cluster?” The stock answer is: “it depends.” WCCS will run just fine on two desktop machines connected by an Ethernet...