Microsoft's High Performance Computing Server 2008 Beta 2 Debuts

• By Kurt Mackie
• 05/22/08

This weekend Microsoft announced the release of High Performance Computing Server 2008 (HPC Server 2008) Beta 2, the next-generation version of Compute Cluster Server 2003.

HPC Server 2008 is built on the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 but is designed to better support large cluster installations.

Microsoft's Group Program Manager for HPC, Ryan Waite, announced the beta release on the Windows Server team blog entry posted Saturday.

"Whew! Friday at 2:18PM we signed off on Beta 2 of Windows HPC Server 2008," he wrote in part. "It's been a hard push since November when we shipped our last beta. Since then we've done test runs on a cluster with over 1000 nodes, fixed over 1000 bugs, coded a bunch of new features, and made a bunch of design changes based on customer feedback."

According to White, some of the new features in beta 2 include:

• New Network Direct RDMA interface.
• New Message Passing Interface.
• An improved Clusrun that now lets administrators "run administrative scripts in parallel across the cluster."
• Improved SOA support in the form of less latency, better scalability and support for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) broker communication, according to White.

The beta is only available to those registered for it through Microsoft Connect.

White did not say when the final version would go live. When the company announced the first beta of HPC Server 2008 in November, Microsoft said it expected to launch the final version in the "second half of 2008."