Goodfolk, One of my customers wanted to know if they had really built a 64-bit application for their cluster. After all, we run WIndows HPC Server on a 64-bit server OS, so why not take full advantage of it? I had a few minutes before I had to get...

I admit to an almost perverse fondness for command line environments. So I decided to jump onto PowerShell as my default command line environment because its way more cool than the cmd shell and even a nerd with a penchant for undead languages sometimes...

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...

In my last post I posed the question "Does Hedging really Work". Since that time I've been doing some research for an article in Windows in Financial Services and received the following quote From Normal 0 ...

We've had reports of a bug with clusrun, specifically that environment variables set using the /env flag to clusrun may or may not get propagated to compute nodes when the clusrun job is run.  For example, doing "clusrun /env:test=ItWorked set"...

A number of large VA providers have active Equity Hedge programs in place for risk management against adverse effects of stock market fluctuations. after the last 18 months of craziness in the stock market, maybe this is the perfect time to examine the...

The HPC Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) was created to give you, the HPC customers the ability to contribute to the design and development of the HPC product. CEIP collects information about how you use HPC product and we, the product team...

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...

To manage/monitor/use a cluster you don’t need to be logged on the head node, you just have to install the HPC Pack on your Windows Workstation. Idealy your PC and the cluster will be into the same Active Directory, but if this is not the case, you...

What will change? Http://windowshpc.net will be migrated from its existing Community Server platform to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Existing users and community members will need to re-register using Microsoft Live ID . We are planning...

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...

MSMPI Tracing Windows HPC Server 2008 (formerly known as Computer Cluster Server v2) includes all new MPI tracing featuring Windows ETW tracing. The new MPI tracing is always available and with a flick of a switch you can turn tracing on or off without...

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...

We recently had the chance to speak with some modelers using Matlab to run some analysis for their Enterprise Risk Management program. They were surprised to find out that Matlab was supported on the Windows Compute Cluster Server. Is anybody else out...

The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) project is a multi-year/multi-institution collaboration to develop a next generation regional forecast model and data assimilation system for operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) and atmospheric research...

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...

Last week at the Valuation Actuaries Symposium I was able to attend a session hosted by Milliman at the Embassy Suites Hotel during which the MG-ALFA modeling product and the MG-Triton Valuation product were discussed and reviewed in the context of how...

One of our most popular features in the Compute Cluster Pack was clusrun (known to you GUI users as “Remote Command Execution”), which allowed you to run a command line command across a set of cluster nodes in parallel, with their output piped back to...

We get an awful lot of questions about how to go about getting the desired process placement across nodes in an MPI job (just check our forums if you don’t believe me), so I thought I’d post here to shed some light on the things that are possible. ...

In the past couple of years I've learned just enough about how computational modeling is used in Actuarial science to begin to understand the real possibilities. In a nutshell, I've found the big three applications are general capital model for purposes...

One of the big challenges as we get close to shipping Windows HPC Server is closing the door on product changes. Now that we have a lot of internal and external customers using the product, everybody generates lots of great ideas on how to improve it...

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 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 ...

We've posted a white paper on how Job Templates can help you manage your cluster. You can check out the white paper here: https://windowshpc.net/Blogs/jobscheduler

Stochastic methods have been well integrated into the Life insurance segment of the industry. From my naive perspective HEalth and to a lesser degree P&C have been unable to benefit from these methods due to a lack of commercial software that exploits...