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...

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...

Today Clustercorp introduced their new hybrid solution, ROCKS(R)+HYBRID, for supporting Windows HPC Server and Linux on the same hardware. They've pulled together a Rocks-based deployment solution that is consistent with both Windows HPC Server 2008 and...

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...

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...

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

A common scenario is to have the Windows HPC Server 2008 Private Network DNS on the head node of the cluster. Because the HPC Pack normally manages name resolution for the private network via Hosts files it propagates to all nodes, we do not normally...

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...

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...

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...

Mellanox has released a new version of its WHQLed WinOF drivers. V2.0.5 build 4453 See: http://www.mellanox.com/content/pages.php?pg=products_dyn&product_family=32&menu_section=34 Click the download tab in the middle of the page and select...

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...

Recently a customer asked me to create a document to briefly describe the charting and reporting functionality in V2. After completing the document I felt that it would make a good blog posting to share with the HPC community. The document is attached...

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...

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...

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...

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...

For ISV application you have to set some environments variables on the compute node. You can set this variable by hand, but if you have many nodes it can be long. So, the idea of this post is how can set them attaumaticaly ? Use the HPCS tools : ...

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...

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 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...

HPC uses HPC sessions to support the service-oriented architecture (SOA) programming model based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Sometimes troubleshooting errors from this SOA based applications could be challenging. However this tip I'm about...

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...

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...

A few months ago, I was asked a question about how to assign a connection specific DNS Suffix to a NIC which was different from the Active Directory Domain. For example, the AD Domain was contoso.com , but they wanted to be able to assign a DNS suffix...