Update 1 for HPC Pack 2012 R2 is available

The installation package for HPC Pack 2012 R2 Update 1 is available for download here. The HPC Pack Image in the Azure Gallery, for both Azure Global and Azure China, is also now generally available. Together with this image, an official PowerShell script tool to deploy an HPC Pack cluster in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs is now downloadable from here.

About two months ago, we announced the release of the Preview version of the Update 1 for HPC Pack 2012 R2, We want to thank everyone who helped us tested the early releases and sent us feedback. We made some important and necessary changes to our official release as a result.

The following are the significant new features in HPC Pack 2012 R2 Update 1:

  • A major focus in Update 1 has been to quickly and robustly create a Windows HPC cluster using Azure virtual machines (IaaS). In order to achieve this goal, we released an HPC Pack image in the Azure Virtual Machine Gallery. All customers with an Azure subscription can use The HPC Pack IaaS deployment script tools to quickly deploy an HPC cluster with just a few steps. For details about how to use these tools, you can refer to the help document here.
  • After a new cluster in Azure has been set up, you can use new tools to manage your HPC cluster in Azure. You can easily create, start, stop, or delete compute nodes as virtual machines on your cluster.Custom compute node images are supported. You can leverage this customization to make your whole deployment process much faster when installing applications and other dependencies. For more details, please see the online help document here.
  • We also continued the investment around our existing scenario for “bursting” to Azure with Platform as a Service (PaaS) compute instances. To further enhance this scenario, we added grow/shrink capabilities to the HPC Pack scheduler. Now you can configure your HPC cluster to automatically adjust the number of active VMs in Azure, whether using virtual machine compute nodes or PaaS compute nodes. For more details, see the help document here.
  • There are also several important new support and bug fixes added for HPC Pack, such as support of SQL Server 2014 and moving nodes to a different cluster. For more details, you can refer to the What’s New and Release Notes documents.

This post came from Microsoft