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
