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Update 2 for HPC Pack 2012 R2 is now available

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We are pleased to announce today that Update 2, our newest release of HPC Pack 2012 R2, is now available.

The most exciting new feature in Update 2 is the support for Linux on Azure. It allows you to add Linux VMs as compute nodes when you deploy an HPC Pack cluster on Azure. Customers with Linux workloads can now take advantage of the advanced deployment, management, and scheduling capabilities in HPC Pack. This new capability of HPC Pack complements the support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology on Linux VMs in Azure that we are also announcing today. RDMA technology enables A8 and A9 VMs running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 to directly communicate through the InfiniBand backend network, providing the low latency and high throughput communication that is required by parallel workloads and applications that use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol.

Of course, there are other new features and improvements in Update 2:

  • Support for Excel workloads on Azure – You can now use an Azure template to quickly deploy a cluster on Azure that has Excel preinstalled on all compute nodes. After the cluster is deployed, you only need to make a few simple changes to your Excel workbook to start submitting jobs to your cluster, while HPC Pack takes care of moving the workbook data to the cloud for you. This new feature is initially available as a preview, so we are eager to get your feedback about it.

  • Improved auto grow/shrink functionality – The grow/shrink functionality for Azure VM resources that we introduced with Update 1 is now a built-in service that you can readily enable, disable and configure as a cluster property. Also, we have made grow/shrink more efficient and configurable, making this functionality more agile and providing you with more control over VM resources.

  • Improvements to SOA – The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) runtime in HPC Pack now offers improved performance and scalability by supporting basicHttpBinding and Azure storage queue for communication during SOA sessions, as well as allowing communication with SOA clients that are outside of the cluster domain (for example, an on-premises client interacting with an HPC Pack cluster that is deployed on Azure VMs).

  • Support for reserved public IP addresses on Azure – If your firewall or applications require a static IP address when communicating to Azure, you can now leverage the reserved public IP address functionality in Azure for your burst (PaaS) deployments from HPC Pack.

  • Added more views in HPC job manager – With this improvements, HPC job users can be able to see more useful information in the HPC job manager. Like SOA jobs view, Heat map view and monitoring chart view.

This is just the beginning! There are other new features and improvements in Update 2, together with updated HPC Pack deployment script tools and new HPC Pack image on Azure. To learn more about the detailed description and how to get the new package, please visit the Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2 Update 2 webpage.

As always, we look forward to hearing from you. You can get in touch with us via the Windows HPC Forum, or you can email us directly.