'Tool Pack' is the name we use to release various utilities written by the dev team in their spare time. Today we are adding one new tool. The 'Node XML Editor for Excel' - If you are looking for a handy way to create node XML files to efficiently...

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...

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...

HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP 2 Beta is a pre-release version of the upcoming service pack which will include a number of new features such as: Ability to use Virtual Machines in Azure Ability to run MPI-based applications in Azure Linq to HPC (formerly...

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...

Because ISVs have to support solutions from multiple vendors, I frequently get asked: "How do I know if I am running on CCS?" It's a good question. Also, as future versions of the product get shipped, it will be increasingly important to be able to tell...

The first 'service pack' for the HPC Pack 2008 R2 product is now available! This update includes the standard reliability improvements that all of our service packs do, but it also adds several new features that you have asked for. Compute nodes can...

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...

Come watch our development manager, Greg Burgess, give a talk on how HPC applications can be made to work in Windows Azure. Windows Azure is an ideal environment for deploying compute-intensive apps that take advantage of the scale-on-demand capability...

Every year in April the users and creators of the Condor Open source scheduling solution meet in Madison WI, for Condor Week. In the past my employer, Microsoft, has strongly encouraged the implementation of Condor on Windows. When we introduced our own...

Today we have added an example of how to use Windows Server AppFabric Caching in conjunction with high performance SOA-based applications. The 'Common Data Caching Sample' package contains both a white paper describing the solution as well as some sample...

I was asked today where there was a quick explanation of how to submit a job from the command line, and I realized that I didn't have a really good answer. So I figured I'd do a blog post (first in a while, I know!) on how to do this. Starting Simple...

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...

One of the HPC team’s “sister groups” is the Parallel Computing Platform team, which creates tools that allow developers to efficiently harness the power of multicore processors. We are pleased to say that they have recently announced...

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...

'Tool Pack' is the name we use to release various utilities written by the dev team in their spare time. Today we've released one new tool and an update to an old favorite. Lizard - the good old Li npack tuning wi zard has been updated with some...

Parameter Sweeps are one of the most common types of jobs that get run on HPC clusters, and we've done some work in Windows HPC Server 2008 to make them easier (and faster) than ever. Today I'll dig in a little on what's different and how to take advantage...

For me, one of the most exciting new features in Windows HPC Server 2008 is our Windows PowerShell interface. It's not only incredibly powerful, it's quite easy to learn! And it's very useful for posting demos and examples up here. So I figured it made...

If you are interested in High Availability / Failover Clustering (and really, who isn't?) then this is the post you've been waiting for... Three new topics have been added to our TechNet documenation library. 1) Configuring Windows HCP Server 2008...

I know there were a bunch of folks waiting on this, so I'm happy to say the REST API documentation for the HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP3 release is available. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides access to the HPC Job Scheduler Service...

If you have an HPC Pack 2008 R2-based cluster that you have not yet upgraded to SP1 - Why? HPC Pack service packs provide the most current set of fixes to improve stability, reliability, and performance. This particular service pack also included some...

We've just published new guidance on how to do capacity planning and tuning for the database that runs your HPC Pack 2008 R2-based cluster. Visit Database Capacity Planning and Tuning in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and then let us know what you think...

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...

We find many of our Windows HPC Server 2008 deployments are going into environments where there are existing Linux (and Linux HPC) solutions. It is possible to configure these two environments to achieve integrated authentication, file sharing and job...

There were a lot of questions about how to use Activation and Submission Filters to help customize queue managmeent and do things like license-aware scheduling. That, on top of some changes made in a QFE , led us to do an updated doc on using filters...