Microsoft has updated two utilities packaged together and designed for customers running the latest iterations of the company’s Windows platform for the high performance computers.

A new release of the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 and HPC Pack 2008 R2 Tool Pack is now up for grabs from the Microsoft Download Center.

The Tool Pack is offered free of charge and is available for download to all customers running the latest couple of releases of Windows for Supercomputers.

According to the Redmond company, both Lizard and ClusterCopy, the two utilities bundled into the Tool Pack have been refreshed on August 19th, 2010.

“Lizard helps you to determine the computational performance and efficiency that can be achieved by your HPC Pack 2008-based / Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster,” Microsoft revealed.

“It calculates and reports a peak performance value for your HPC cluster in billions of floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS), and a percentage value for the efficiency that was achieved at peak performance."

“After running Lizard, you can review the performance and efficiency results that were obtained, and optionally save these results and the parameters that were used to achieve them to a file on your computer.”

At the same time, customers dealing with either HPC Pack 2008 or 2008 R2-based clusters, can also leverage ClusterCopy.

“ClusterCopy helps you easily distribute files around your cluster,” the software giant explained.

“Simply put your data files on a single file share, use the ClusterCopy tool, and a series of jobs will be created to rapidly copy the files throughout the cluster, using a tree-based copy system.”

In order to install ClusterCopy, the utility needs to be run in the customer’s workstation.

Deployment is a tad more complicated when it comes down to Lizard, as the tool needs to be launched from the cluster's head node, and only from there. “If running a High Availability / failover head node, this tool must be run on the 'active' node,” Microsoft added.

Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 and HPC Pack 2008 R2 Tool Pack is available for download here.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite Evaluation is available for download here.