HPC Pack 2008 SDK

Brief Description

The Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 SDK was designed to provide the tools and content necessary to write parallel applications for the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform.

Overview

Microsoft HPC Server 2008 (HPC) provides secure, scalable cluster resource management, a job scheduler, and a Message Passing Interface (MPI) stack for parallel programming. HPC includes the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 SDK that you can use to write client applications that interact with the job scheduler. You can use the SDK to schedule jobs on Microsoft HPC Server 2008 and later servers; you cannot use this SDK to schedule jobs on Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS). For complete details on the SDK, see Microsoft HPC Pack on MSDN.

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System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP

NOTE: This version has been superseded by by HPC Pack 2008 SDK Service Pack 1

Using this SDK does not require a cluster of 64 bit computers.

Here is what you need:

Minimum Hardware Required: At least one industry standard personal computer (either 32-bit or 64-bit) with at least 128MB RAM, a monitor and a keyboard.

Supported Operating Systems: The SDK does not require the system to be member of a domain. Any one of the following operating systems may be used with the SDK. Please make sure to install all the latest updates available from Microsoft Update site.

Windows XP Professional 32-bit
Windows XP Professional x64 edition
Windows Server 2003 32-bit
Windows Server 2003 x64 edition
Windows Vista 32-bit
Windows Vista x64
Windows Server 2008 32-bit
Windows Server 2008 x64 edition

Cluster behavior can be emulated by running multiple processes on a single computer, for example,

mpiexec -n 10 sample.exe

will start 10 instances of sample.exe.

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Instructions

The SDK installation is fairly simple. Just pick either 32-bit or 64-bit MSI installer package depending on the system you are using. The installer will walk you though the SDK setup process.

If you will be writing applications that call the scheduler API you must install the client utilities included with Windows HPC Server 2008 to ensure that the appropriate scheduler DLLs are installed. You may obtain the product and utilities in one of three ways.

1. Through your workplace volume license
2. MSDN
3. Download the evaluation version of the product from here

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