Windows HPC Server 2008 R2: Product Evaluation and Planning

Updated: June 2012

Applies To: Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

This section contains information to help a cluster administrator evaluate and plan for a Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 cluster.

Note
The Design and Deployment Guide for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 includes important planning information such as system requirements, network topologies, and other deployment options. For detailed information, see Step 1: Prepare for Your Deployment.

In this section

This section includes the following documents:

Title Description

What’s new

These topics summarize new and changed features in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and the HPC Pack 2008 R2 service packs to help you get up to speed quickly.

Feature evaluation

These guides includes scenarios and steps to help you try new features in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and the HPC Pack 2008 R2 service packs.

What Is Included in the HPC Services for Excel

This topic describes the features that are included with HPC Services for Excel. HPC Services for Excel include service-oriented architecture (SOA) clients and services that enable developers to quickly convert workbooks to run on a cluster. The cluster-side features are available with the Enterprise Edition of HPC Pack 2008 R2.

Compatibility of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 with Previous Versions of Windows HPC Server

This topic summarizes the compatibility of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 with Windows HPC Server 2008 and Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.

Database Capacity Planning and Tuning for Microsoft HPC Pack

The information in this topic is intended to help you determine the database configuration and additional tuning options that are appropriate for your Windows HPC cluster.

Additional resources

The following additional resources are available to help you evaluate Windows HPC Server 2008 R2:

Title Description

FAQ about Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

Questions about licensing, requirements, pricing, migration, and backwards compatibility for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 are all answered here.

Applications for Windows HPC Server

This page provides a list of applications that run on Windows HPC Server. The list is sortable, and can be filtered by category (for example, Financial Services, Life Sciences, Manufacturing) and by type (Commercial or Open Source).

Videos

Links to videos about Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, including overviews of technical computing, monitoring, management, diagnostics, and job scheduling.

Datasheet for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

This datasheet outlines the ease of deployment, the powerful monitoring and scheduling tools, and the enhanced productivity that Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 provides.

Installation Preparation Wizard

Available in the HPC Pack 2008 R2 Tool Pack, the Installation Preparation Wizard identifies environment and operating system configuration settings that can cause HPC Pack 2008 R2 installation, configuration, and node deployment issues. It This wizard can be run from any computer, before HPC Pack 2008 R2 is installed. It generates an HTML report with warnings, checklists, best practices, and links to online documentation.

Download Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suite Evaluation

You can download the evaluation versions of the Windows Server® 2008 R2 HPC Edition operating system and HPC Pack 2008 R2.

Deploy a virtual HPC 2008 R2 cluster for evaluation purposes (click-through tutorial)

The click-through simulation will guide you through the installation of virtual Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 cluster. The virtual HPC compute nodes will be deployed automatically over a virtual network. Configuring your own cluster while following this simulation should take about 2 hours.

Windows HPC Server 2008 R2

The technical library for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2.