14 DAY TRIAL // The first upgrade to the last release of Windows for supercomputers brings a set of new integration features that allow customers to leverage Microsoft’s Cloud. Microsoft has recently made available for download Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, enabling customers running the plain vanilla version of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, to kick their platform version up a notch.
Enhanced Windows Azure integration is just one of the goodies that Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 brings to the table, with additional enhancements related to node management, job scheduling and runtime, and development.
“This update includes the standard reliability improvements that all of our service packs do, but it also adds several new features that you have asked for,” revealed Microsoft’s Don Pattee.
“Compute nodes can now submit new jobs to the cluster to enhance your workflow, cluster administrators can now create 'idleness' rules for bringing workstation nodes online, and one of the most visible changes is that you can now join Azure nodes to your cluster to increase productivity with several workloads.”
As far as Cloud integration goes, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 now allows customers to deploy Azure worker nodes.
At the same time, the service pack also makes it possible for SOA services, XLLs and batch job assemblies to also be deployed to Azure worker nodes.
Among the Cloud-related improvements in SP1 is also the ability to run select SOA services on Azure nodes. This can be done without changing the service or the client in any way.
Additional improvements include:
“- User activity detection for workstation nodes. In HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP1, you can schedule workstation availability policy based on configurable user activity detection settings
- Mark tasks as critical. In HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP1, you can mark a specific task in a job as critical. If that task fails, then the whole job should fail.
- Submit new jobs from a running job. In HPC Pack 2008 R2 SP1, you can configure and submit new jobs from running tasks without having to supply your password again for each new job.
- C# Cluster-SOA debugger add-in for Visual Studio 2010. The SOA debugger is now available as an add-in to the Visual Studio 2010 C# project system,” Microsoft revealed.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 is available for download here.