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Announcing the release of HPC Pack 2012

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Announcing the immediate availability of the next major version of Windows HPC software: HPC Pack 2012

The fourth 'major version' of the HPC software brings improved performance and reliability to the HPC platform, simplifies the installation experience, and adds some great new features such as:

  • support for Windows Server 2012 (head nodes, compute nodes, broker nodes, and unmanaged server nodes) and Windows 8 (as clients and workstation nodes)
  • the ability to customize the tuning of MPI operations for improved performance on your hardware
  • the ability to increase cluster robustness by adding more than 2 head nodes in a failover cluster group
  • the ability to install a head node on a Windows Azure VM, so an entire cluster can run 'in the cloud'
  • all features previously split between the 'Express,' 'Enterprise,' and 'Workstation' or 'Cycle Harvesting' editions now available through a single installation
  • additional features are described in the What’s New in HPC Pack 2012 document

If you are using the Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK, this update comes with the same reliability and performance improvements that the HPC Pack is getting, and also adds compatability with the Windows Azure SDK October 2012 / v1.8 release.

Before installing either, take a look at the What’s New in HPC Pack 2012 document and Release Notes over on our Windows HPC Technical Library.

More details and additional documentation will arrive in January, in the mean time head over to the Windows HPC Discussion forums if you have any questions or comments. We'll be happy to hear from you!

 

Note: The single HPC Pack 2012 download contains all the features previously seperated in the Express, Workstation, Cycle Harvesting, and Enterprise editions. Standalone 'Client Utilities' and 'MS-MPI' packages have also been updated for HPC Pack 2012.