14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made available for download the second service pack for the HPC Pack 2008 software designed to kick up a notch HPC Pack 2008-based clusters. The release is bound to be of interest to Windows HPC Server 2008 customers in tandem with the HPC Pack 2008. Obviously, HPC Pack 2008 Service Pack 1 must be installed prior to deploying SP2, but companies running clusters powered by the Redmond company’s high-performance computing operating system should expect nothing more than a minor upgrade.
“This service pack is a minor bug fixing release, it does not add any major new functionality. It does fix various reliability issues, and is suggested that all users of HPC Pack 2008 install it,” Microsoft’s Don Pattee revealed. As it is designed to supersede SP1, HPC Pack 2008 SP2 brings to the table all the updates that the software giant released for the HPC solution following the launch of the first service pack.
According to Pattee, SP2 includes: “KB 975890 – A fix that improves MPI performance when running an Nehalem processors. KB 978570 – A fix that will help prevent the Boot.wim file from growing excessively large. If a cluster already has a large (>200megs) boot.wim manual repair steps still need to be taken. KB 973710 – A fix that improves the interaction between SOA-based jobs and the ‘immediate preemption’ feature of the HPC job scheduler. KB 981193 – Added support for the ‘IsExclusive’ flag to SOA service jobs.”
For the time being, customers interested in taking HPC Pack 2008 to the next stage in its evolution will need to download and deploy the service pack manually. Come June 2010, the company plans to start serving SP2 through Microsoft Update. This would be valid “for all systems except failover/HA head node pairs (those need to be manually installed),” Pattee added. Otherwise, the service pack can be installed on HPC Pack 2008 SP1 system, including head nodes, compute nodes, broker nodes, client machines, etc.
HPC Pack 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2) is available for download here.