HPC Pack 2008 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

The second service pack to the HPC Pack 2008 software is now available!

This service pack is a minor bug fixing release, it does not add any major new functionality. It does fix various reliability issues, and is suggested that all users of HPC Pack 2008 install it.

The service pack supercedes (includes the fixes for) the Post-SP1 updates that have been released:

1. KB 975890 – A fix that improves MPI performance when running an Nehalem processors
2. KB 978570 – A fix that will help prevent the Boot.wim file from growing excessively large. If a cluster already has a large (>200megs) boot.wim manual repair steps still need to be taken.
3. KB 973710 – A fix that improves the interaction between SOA-based jobs and the ‘immediate preemption’ feature of the HPC job scheduler.
4. KB 981193 – Added support for the ‘IsExclusive’ flag to SOA service jobs.

The update installer is available at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=9893ee85-b3c4-4ad8-ac3e-76c4478dbfa5. This can be used to manually install the service pack on any system running HPC Pack 2008 SP1 (head nodes, compute nodes, broker nodes, client machines). Starting next month the update will be available through Microsoft Update for all systems except failover/HA head node pairs (those need to be manually installed). Note, for either installation method SP1 must already be installed for this service pack to apply.

Please review the 'release notes' at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=191953 for tips on installing and a list of known issues.

The SDK has also been updated and is available at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=13644dcd-4022-4bbc-b18f-1c9e9461d5bd.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  A minor issue was found in SP2 that could affect users who have applications that interact with the HPC job scheduler via COM. While we prepare a fix for the issue we have disabled the downloads of SP2. Unfortunately disabling the SP2 file had the side effect of removing the description page - so the URL in the blog post will go to a '404 - page not found' page for now. As soon as the fix is available the SP2 download will be made available again, and the download page will start working.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Note that the SP2 package is now available again on the Download Center. Additionally there is an update that you can apply to your headnode and client machines if you are encountering problems with COM-based applications communicating with the cluster:www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx