Please review these before downloading your trial software:
Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 Express includes the essential software for Windows-based HPC clusters including job scheduling, message passing interface (MPI) and other development application programming interface, system administration, deployment, and support for high speed networking.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite: is the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition and the Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 Enterprise.
Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC Edition: is a 64-bit Windows Server operating system including the necessary features and roles for the purpose of running clustered HPC applications.
Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 Enterprise: includes a superset of the functionality included in the HPC Pack 2008 R2 Express along with the capability to add Windows 7 based workstation nodes and the ability to run Excel 2010 calculations across the cluster using a new HPC Services
Along with product fixes, SP1 includes the ability to include Windows Azure-based worker nodes and new availability policy options for clusters using Windows 7-based workstation nodes. SP1 enables service oriented, HPC, jobs to be executed as a web service using Windows Azure i.e. you can use resources running within a Windows Azure data center as temporary “compute nodes” to extend the capabilities of your on-premise Windows HPC cluster. Additionally, SP1 expands the scheduling policies for workstation nodes. Along with time-based scheduling, workstation availability policies can also include idle detection including an administrator specified time since an input device was last used and threshold for when CPU utilization drops below a specified level.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP2 provides several new features to improve your HPC capabilities and performance. These new features include: the ability to add Windows Azure VM (virtual machine) roles to the cluster, support for the MPI runtime in Windows Azure, support for LINQ to HPC for large-scale distributed data analysis, new scheduler policies including lend/borrow and the ability to over-subscribe or under-subscribe core or socket counts on cluster nodes, multi-domain support for workstation nodes, web portal for job submission and job status, and smart card authentication. These and other enhancements to Windows HPC Server will further provide you with one of the most powerful, comprehensive, and cost effective supercomputing solutions available today. Learn more about the Window HPC Server 2008 R2 SP2.
