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.