Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite
the power to realize big ideas.
Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite is the third version of Microsoft’s solution for high performance computing (HPC). Built on Windows Server® 2008 R2 64-bit technology, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite makes it easier than ever for companies to benefit from high-performance computing.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite has two components:
The Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition operating system. A version of the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system designed for use in an HPC cluster. Differences between HPC Edition, Standard, and Enterprise can be reviewed at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/editions.aspx
The HPC Pack 2008 R2 Enterprise application. HPC Pack 2008 R2 Enterprise provides the job scheduling, cluster management, and other features that make the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite an excellent HPC cluster solution.
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Advantages
Easier for Everyone
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite makes it easier and more affordable to put the power of supercomputing within reach of more analysts, engineers, and scientists, helping them make better decisions, fuel product innovation, speed research and development, and accelerate time to market. A rich tool-set empowers system administrators to deploy and manage powerful HPC solutions more easily, helps developers build HPC applications more quickly, and enables end users to access HPC resources.
Integrated with your Existing Infrastructure
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite allows you to use familiar applications like Excel, System Center, and Visual Studio while integrating with an existing current Linux HPC infrastructure. This integration enables organizations to take advantage of existing technology investments and employee skill sets to minimize TCO, optimize ROI, and make HPC resources easier to manage, augment, and extend to end users.
World Class Performance
Delivering outstanding performance, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite efficiently scales to thousands of processing cores enabling organizations of all sizes to rapidly harness the power of supercomputing to solve complex computational challenges. Utilize out-of-the-box support for deploying, running, and managing clusters consisting of thousands of processing cores.
Support for Windows 7 and HPC Services for Excel 2010
Expand the capacity of HPC clusters while increasing the return on your existing technology investments by utilizing desktop cycles as part of your overall HPC infrastructure.
Support for Workstations Nodes
You can now add computers that are running the Windows 7 operating system to your HPC cluster. These computers are added as workstation nodes, and you can use them to run cluster jobs. Workstation nodes are not dedicated cluster computers, and can be used for other tasks. They can automatically become available to run cluster jobs according to a weekly availability policy that you configure (for example, every night on weekdays and all day on weekends), or they can be brought online manually, depending on the configuration that you choose.
Download Adding Workstations to HPC Server Clusters »
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite provides the following ways to integrate with Microsoft® Excel® 2010, which helps run Excel workbooks and User Defined Functions significantly faster on a Windows HPC Cluster:
Running Excel Workbooks on an Windows HPC Cluster
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite now enables running distributed instances of Excel 2010 on a Windows HPC cluster, where each instance is running an independent recalculation or iteration of the same workbook with a different dataset.
Running Excel User-Defined Functions on a Windows HPC Cluster
Cluster-Safe User Defined Functions are a new feature of Microsoft Office Excel 2010, which provides the ability to run complex, or time consuming User Defined Functions – functions contained in Excel extension libraries (XLLs) – on a Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite based cluster.
Running Excel as a Windows HPC cluster SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Client
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite also provides ways to use Excel as WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) clients to submit SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) requests to a calculation service on a cluster and then visualize the results.
Additionally, two new diagnostic tests for Microsoft Excel 2010 were added. By running these diagnostic tests, you can determine if Microsoft Excel 2010 is installed and properly licensed on your HPC cluster, as well as verify that the user-defined function (UDF) container service is loaded and ready on the nodes.
For additional information on integrating HPC Server with Microsoft Excel 2010 please see the following whitepapers:
Other New Features
Enhanced Resource Sharing
With a Windows HPC cluster installed on an organization’s network, all authorized users in the organization can take advantage of the cluster. A single cluster can support multiple users and Excel applications while providing a central point for resource management and optimized resource sharing across the organization.
Because it’s based on the latest version of the Windows Server operating system, Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite also enables organizations to take advantage of the many enhancements in Windows Server 2008 R2, including:
Performance improvements in SMB support, input/output, and thread scheduling
Support for more threads (256 versus 64)
Deployment enhancements, including support for multiband multicast in the Windows Deployment Services transport
Deployment
Efficient deployment of more than 1,000 nodes
Deploy nodes that boot over the network by using an iSCSI connection. This new feature helps you to centralize your storage, and to deploy diskless nodes (that is, computers that do not run the operating system from a local hard disk drive or that do not have a hard disk drive installed)
Diskless, iSCSI network boot of compute nodes
Backwards compatibility with Windows HPC Server 2008 node templates
Support for compute nodes based on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (including mixed-version clusters)
During the installation process of HPC Pack 2008 R2 Suite, you can configure Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 SP2 databases on computers that are not the head node of your HPC cluster, and then use them to host cluster management, job scheduling, reporting, and diagnostics information
Support for remote HPC databases
System Management – Including Diagnostics and Reporting
Improved heat map view in HPC Cluster Management, to support the display of large clusters. You can see the status of up to 1,000 nodes without scrolling. Additionally, you can configure color-coded overlays of information in the heat map view, and have a prioritized metric display
Quickly view compute nodes in HPC Cluster Manager based on their location information, both in the list and heat map views. In the heat map view, you can now select to display nodes grouped by their location information. For more efficient viewing options, you can specify up to three levels of location detail for each node: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
Create multiple customizable tabs in HPC Cluster Manager. This enables you to have several list and heat map views available at the same time, each one displaying the metrics that you select.
An extensible diagnostic framework that allows independent software vendors (ISVs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs) and administrators to easily create custom diagnostic tests in any programming or scripting language. The custom tests can integrate with the product's diagnostic UI and scripting experience - including test result formatting, alerting on failures and preserving test run history.
Includes a new set of diagnostic tests that help you to find common problems that can affect node deployment. This new set of diagnostic tests verifies connectivity with the Active Directory® domain controller, availability of the DHCP server and the DNS server, and also verifies that the provided installation credentials have the appropriate privileges to perform the node deployment tasks.
Changes to node groups immediately impact the jobs that are queued. This change enables the creation of tools that automatically move nodes between groups in order to hand computational loads differently, or that move nodes based on the time of day
A richer reporting database and enhanced API for building custom reports
Job Scheduling
Support for larger clusters, more jobs, and larger jobs—including improved scheduling and task throughput at scale
Just-in-time parametric sweep expansion, which improves performance for creating large parametric task sweeps
A new scheduling mode, Service-balanced scheduling, that optimizes the process of starting jobs, and balances in real time the resources that are assigned to jobs, according to their priority
A new user interface for viewing and reporting job progress
Node preparation and release tasks that run before and after a job to prepare and clean up nodes
A simplified user interface and experience for troubleshooting jobs
An improved Job and Node Template Editor
Cluster administrators that need a finer control for job priorities can now define 400 priority levels. The 5 priority levels that were available with previous releases are still available
Cluster users can select to receive e-mail notifications when their job starts or completes
Now specific nodes can be excluded from running a job by creating a node exclusion list. This new feature can help avoid nodes that have a particular configuration or other characteristics that are not appropriate to run the job, or that are known to have intermittent problems running specific types of jobs
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Runtime
Support for durable SOA connections via a fire and recollect programming model support
Hooks for adding finalization logic to services, which enable developers to add logic to perform cleanup before a service exits
Improved interoperability with Java client applications
New capabilities for managing SOA applications—in the areas of setup and configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and event tracing
Broker node auto-restart and persisted storage of calculation results
Fail-over across broker nodes in the event of a hardware failure
Ability to cancel service requests without canceling the current session, saving calculation resources.
SOA sessions will exclude compute nodes that keep failing SOA service tasks or requests. This new functionality is based on the new node exclusion listing feature for job scheduling
A new interface for service code to write a user-level trace. HPC Cluster Manager includes a new user interface to configure service tracing. Also, there is a new user interface and new PowerShell cmdlets to collect and remove traces
SOA Applications, Infrastructure and Management with Windows® HPC 2008 R2 Suite »
The C# Cluster-SOA Debugger for Windows HPC 2008 R2 Suite is now available.
The Cluster-SOA Debugger helps you debug service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based applications that are running on a Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite cluster. The Cluster-SOA Debugger is an add-in to the C# project system in Visual Studio 2008. It extends the remote debugger functionality and it simplifies the process of debugging cluster SOA services on a cluster. The Cluster-SOA Debugger for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite includes two C# project templates: the Interactive Session Client template and the Durable Session Client template.
Cluster-SOA Debugger is included in the Microsoft HPC Debugger Tool Pack. To download the debugger Add-in, go to Microsoft HPC Debugger Tool Pack Download on the Microsoft Download Center.
Online docs here: C# Cluster-SOA Debugger for Windows HPC 2008 R2 Suite
Networking and Message-Passing Interface (MPI)
Support for new networking options—including RDMA over Ethernet (iWARP) from Intel and RDMA over Infiniband quad data rate (40 Gbps) hardware
Optimization of shared memory implementations for new Intel “Nehalem”-based processors
Improved MPI debugging capabilities (provided in Visual Studio 2010)
A pushbutton LINPACK optimization wizard (“Lizard”)
