Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2 Now Available for Download

Microsoft has released HPC Pack 2012 R2 and available as free download from Microsoft Download Center. This tool upgrades HPC Pack 2012 with SP1 clusters and can be used for new Window HPC cluster installations.

Details
HPC Pack 2012 R2 provides improved reliability, support on Windows Server 2012 R2 and WIndows 8.1 for certain node roles, as well as an enhanced feature set for Windows Azure integration, job scheduling, and cluster management.

What's new in HPC Pack 2012 R2?
HPC Pack 2012 R2 includes a number of new features and changes:

Deployment

• Operating system requirements are updated.

Windows Azure integration

• Stop or remove selected Windows Azure nodes.
• Additional compute instance sizes are supported in Windows Azure node deployments.

Job scheduling

• The performance of graceful preemption in Balanced scheduling mode is improved for HPC SOA jobs.

Runtimes and development

• MS-MPI adds mechanisms to start processes dynamically
• MS-MPI can be updated independently of HPC Pack. 

For complete information on what's new in this release, refer to the What's New in Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2

The following downloads are available:

• HPCPack2012R2-Update-amd64.exe / HPCPack2012R2-Update-i386.exe : Download these updaters to upgrade your exisiting HPC Pack 2012 with SP1 head nodes, compute nodes, broker nodes, client computers, workstation nodes, and unmanaged server nodes. Please install the appropriate updater for the CPU architecture on computers that have already had HPC Pack 2012 SP1 components installed.
• HPCPack2012R2-Full.zip : Download this .zip file to have a full installation package to set up an HPC Pack 2012 R2 cluster. It also contains the Web Components (REST interface and Web Portal) and KSP (soft card) installers necessary to use those features. If you install this package on an existing HPC Pack node, please uninstall existing HPC Pack 2012 components first.

Download the HPC Pack 2012 R2
To download the packages for the HPC Pack 2012 R2 1 update, go to the Microsoft Download Center. Once you click on the “Download” button, you will be prompted to select the files you need.

For important information that you should read prior to installing HPC Pack 2012 R2, please see the release notes.

System Requirements
Supported Operating Systems:

• Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2

For complete information on system requirements please visit Windows HPC website.

References
HPC Pack 2012 R2
Release Notes for Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2