Jun 30, 2011 11:16 GMT  ·  By

Customers running HPC Pack 2008 R2 can now upgrade to the second service pack offered by Microsoft, which went live earlier this week.

HPC Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2) is served through the Microsoft Download Center, free of charge as is the case for all such upgrades from the software giant.

Of course, HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP2 brings to the table a number of enhancements, from patches, to bug fixes, but also to stability and performance improvements. This was somewhat to be expected from the Redmond company.

But there are additional changes in HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP2, with Microsoft providing early adopters the chance to test them as early as May 2011, when the Beta of the high performance computing offering went live.

Microsoft’s Don Pattee enumerated some of the new features in HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP2 RTM, including:

“• Enhanced Azure capabilities, such as adding Azure VM nodes to your cluster, creating Azure node configuration scripts, and supporting Remote Desktop connections

• Ability to run MPI-based applications in Azure

• Job scheduling support through a REST interface and an IIS-hosted web portal

• A new job scheduling policy that uses 'resource pools' to ensure compute access to different user groups

• SOA improvements, such as in-process broker support for increased speed, and a new common data staging feature.”

The software giant is offering a single SP2 installer designed to upgrade both the Express and Enterprise flavors of HPC Pack 2008 R2 to SP2.

In addition, Microsoft HPC customers can also grab the HPC Pack 2008 R2 Client Utilities Redistributable Package with Service Pack 2 and the HPC Pack 2008 R2 MS-MPI Redistributable Package with Service Pack 2.

“An important note is that this service pack cannot be uninstalled by itself. Uninstalling the service pack will also uninstall the HPC Pack itself, so you'll need to take a full backup (including the sql databases) before installation if you want to be able to 'roll back',” Pattee added.

HPC Pack 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 (SP2) RTM is available for download here.

HPC Pack 2008 R2 Client Utilities Redistributable Package with Service Pack 2 is available for download here.

HPC Pack 2008 R2 MS-MPI Redistributable Package with Service Pack 2 is available for download here.