Microsoft High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack 2012 beta program now open

Ron

Microsoft is now accepting beta applicants for the High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack 2012 beta program. For those that don’t know, Windows HPC Server is a high performance computing (HPC) solution built on Windows Server technology that provides a set of tools for your HPC environment.

This is Microsoft’s 4th major version and the High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack 2012 comes with the following features:

  • Windows Server 2012 (including ‘Server Core’), the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and Windows 8 are all now supported
  • A single version of HPC Pack 2012 now includes all the functionality that used to be split across the HPC Pack 2008 Express, Enteprise, Workstations and Cycle Harvesting editions
  • HPC Pack now supports extending your enterprise network to Windows Azure via ‘Project Brooklyn’
  • MS-MPI has a new ‘message compression’ feature to reduce the time spent waiting on communications to complete
  • The job scheduler now allows for dependencies between jobs (in addition to the task dependencies that already existed) to better integrate with your work flow
  • Windows Azure nodes can be set to automatically mount a VHD, which could contain some static data or application code, to make using HPC Pack’s ‘burst’ functionality even easier
  • and more… A more complete list of new functionality is available once you join the beta

You can sign up for the beta program here.