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I have finally updated my notes on the installation of Infiniband on Windows Server 2008. They now cover the released version 2.0 of Mellanox WinOF stack. You can find the document in my skydrive public folder . Let me know if you find it useful. Powered
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On a Windows HPC Server 2008 head node, that is... 1. No Infiniband on the head node In many cases people want to save themselves some money by not installing an Infiniband adapter on the head node, thereby also sparing a port on that expensive infiniband
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I have received a few questions about upgrades from the evaluation version that you can download from microsoft.com/hpc to a full version. The good news is that the evaluation version is fully functional, so you won't need a complete re-installation.
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You’ve prepared your templates, configured your network, your firewalls and everything you could think of, yet your automated provisioning takes forever and eventually fails… Well, check if you have a patching task in your node template. If you do, you’ll
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Well, there is no upgrade path, so the quickest way is to re-image. Download the RC build of the HPC software from connect.microsoft.com. If you have Infiniband cards, download the latest WinIB-ND drivers (1.4.0.2577) from http://www.mellanox.com. 1.
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Fantastic news! Mellanox has released the beta 2 version of their WinIB 1.4 stack , which works with HPC Server 2008 beta 2 and has Network Direct providers for their latest ConnectX cards. The results announced at ISC 08 are outstanding: - 2 microseconds'
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Phil Pennington and I presented a session on cluster performance optimization at Teched 2008 in Orlando. It made it in the top 20 list by customer satisfaction!!! To all those who were there and voted for us: Thank you!!! To all those who were not there
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Microsoft entered the HPC market a couple of years ago with a value proposition based on ease of integration, use and management. The comment we received most often sounded more or less like this: "This is all well and good, but how fast is this
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Thomas Varlet, of Microsoft France, and Dr. Patrice Calegari, of BULL SAS, have written an excellent paper on how to build hybrid clusters, i.e. clusters where 2 or more operating systems can be run at the same time. It is recommended reading, in my opinion,
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The UK HPC user group is meeting in London on June 26th, for what promises to be an interesting day at the Imperial War Museum. This meeting is intended for customers, partners and developers to “meet and mingle”, compare notes and provide Microsoft with
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Hey all, I'm doing another series of webcasts. 2 of them have already been aired, two more will happen shortly. Here are the topics: - deployment and management - high availability - new scheduler features - hpc server 2008 and linux You'll find a link
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Did you notice that the latest CTP has introduced a new option for mpiexec? Using mpiexec -affinity you can affinitize the mpi rank to the core where it is started, thus avoiding context switches. Your application will determine whether you actually benefit
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I've recently been involved in a simple benchmarking exercise. Here are a few quick "rules of thumb" that have helped me: - 4x4 A PCIe 4x slot is supposed to have 4 lanes capable of 250 MB/s each, for a total of 1 GB/s. An Infiniband SDR 4x card has 4
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In my last post I investigated how HPC can be used to build UFOs. This time, I've learned to my surprise that HPC can be used to make movies! Digital media production follows a complex workflow, from initial sketch to wireframe model, to rendered 3D images,
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To many people HPC is like UFOs: We there's somebody somewhere, but we don't really know what they're doing and where they fit in the grand scheme of things. Here's my attempt at explaining them (UFOs AND HPC). Happy reading . If you think I've smoked
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