Welcome to the Microsoft High Performance Computing Beta Site.

Microsoft's HPC team creates software to enable you to easily harness the power of cluster-based supercomputing on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, and Windows Azure.

Existing releases include the Microsoft Compute Cluster Pack, Microsoft HPC Pack 2008, Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 R2 Express and Enterprise, as well as the Windows HPC Server 2008 and Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Suites. New software called the "Windows Azure Scheduler" is currently undergoing beta testing.

Our HPC software can be used for massively parallel programs (computational fluid dynamics, reservoir simulation) as well as embarrassingly parallel programs (BLAST, Monte Carlo simulations).

An HPC Pack 2008 R2-based system is a cluster of servers that includes a head node, and one or more compute nodes (on-premises or Azure-based). The head node controls and mediates all access to the cluster resources and is the single point of management, deployment and job scheduling for the compute cluster. It utilizes the existing corporate Active Directory infrastructure for security and account management.

 The Windows Azure Scheduler software development kit is a solution that enables you to deploy applications in a scalable, high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure in Windows Azure. Applications that have been built using the on-premises job submission API in Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 can use very similar job submission interfaces in the Windows Azure Scheduler.