Our first Beta release is now available! You can read the full press release at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/nov09/11-16SC09PR.mspx if you're in to reading that kind of thing ;) Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 delivers productivity, performance...

Hi Everyone: I Have to confess it has been almost 8 months since my last blog entry. Apparently the world at large has not noticed, but I felt it was important to make the effort and provide a quick update on the status of Actuarial Modeling and Window...

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...

Activation Filters are used to provide the administrator of a Windows HPC cluster with a mechanism to verify and modify jobs before they are run. For example, a Windows HPC Server 2008 Activation Filter receives the job xml which might contain license...

About 4 months ago we released the first major pre-release build of the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 & Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 solution. Now we announce our second, Beta 2. There are a number of enhancements in this release, a couple of them are...

Avoiding Timeouts In HPC 2008 (V2) SOA, a service call lasts more than 10 minutes will cause the broker closes the connection to the client. This will cause a timeout. Example: - Assume call durations may be longer than 10 minutes but shorter...

Recently a couple of my fellow technical specialists and I were working on a Top 500 run at a major US university. We needed to create node.XML templates that associated MAC addresses with node names. It would also be nice if it could also list the rack...

An HPC Server 2008 user reported that his cluster was up and running and that all nodes could ping each other over all networks but the built-in MPI diagnostic was failing with an uninformative message "Failed To Run". He had a topology number three...

We are pleased to announce that Release Candidate 1 (RC 1) of the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 & Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 solution is now available. We've improved the stability and performance in this release, as well as made enhancements to features...

On behalf of the Microsoft High Performance Computing team I am pleased to announce that the HPC Pack 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition, and Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite have hit their 'RTM' (Release to Manufacturing) milestone! This...

This post provides a workaround for customers who have experienced issues with their Windows HPC Server event logs after updating to SP1....

An issue came to our attention after Windows HPC Server 2008 shipped regarding the way we set affinity on the processes within a job. There are actually two places where we set affinity: 1. The Node Manager (the service on each node responsible for...

I find a lot of people are starting to build demonstration clusters on a small scale with some sort of minimal ‘enterprise’ network. In my case the enterprise network is my home router and the private network is a little 5 port GigE switch. To make...

I was recently looking into a failure in a WCF client application that runs just fine with the debugger attached but fails to run stand alone. The error message was as follows: Microsoft.Hpc.ServiceBroker Warning: 0 : Service net.tcp://private.TestHeadNode...

Because most HPC environments already have enterprise data stored on an NFS server, we often get asked how to enable the Windows HPC compute nodes to access the NFS server. In Windows Server 2008, the NFS Client is included as part of the Services for...

I recently ran into an issue where all attempts to run any cluster command from the command line resulted in an authentication failure. We were able to connect to the cluster from the GUI and powershell however all attempts to connect to the cluster from...

I once ran into an issue while installing the HPC Pack on a machine and I was wondering where to go to find more information about the setup failure preferably a log of some sort to see the reason for the failure. Here is a tip that helped. The HPC...

Shahrokh was nice enough to film and post a video of me walking through the HPC Job Scheduler and some of its new features at SuperComputing 2008. You can check out the video up on YouTube . In the video I cover many of the different scheduler interfaces...

If you read the documents posted by Mellanox about their new 2..0.5 build 4453 InfiniBand drivers you may have noticed the advice to update your firmware. If so, you will need to discover your PSID. This should be pretty straight forward, just install...

Microsoft Research has an interesting project called Dryad which is investigating programming models for distributed data-parallel problems. If you've heard some of the hype around map/reduce programming or the Hadoop framework, you might be familiar...

The following new topics were published to the Windows HPC Server 2008 Technical Library : · Windows HPC Server 2008 Service Pack 1 Release Notes ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee221139(WS.10).aspx ) · Security in Windows HPC...

In an earlier post , I described an approach for resolving names when the connection specific DNS suffix did not match the Active Directory domain name. Recently, I realized that there is a much simpler solution. The Default ComputeNode Template which...

SUA is a very nice tool for porting Unix/Linux application, but it can also be used to submit job. You just have to set the path to the HPCS binary into your PATH variable : With BASH : export PATH=$PATH:"/dev/fs/C/Program Files/Microsoft HPC Pack...

If you ever write MPI program in Windows HPC cluster, you should be familiar with MPI Cluster Debugger in Visual Studio2005/2008. Also, you can find much resource online talking about it (such as blog , white paper ). Do you like to debug MPI program...

This might be of interest to HPC PowerShell users. --------------- PowerShellCommunity.org Joins Forces with Microsoft Scripting Guys to Host 2009 Summer Scripting Games LOS ANGELES – At Microsoft TechEd 2009, PowerShellCommunity.org...