On June 16th and June 17th, ScorpioTek delivered an intensive HPC training for IT professionals in Monterrey México at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Léon. The training was delivered by using a remote virtual lab infrastructure, so the on-site setup was minimal (basically a laptop and Internet connection).

We had the chance to work Gerardo, Susan, and Jesús – the IT masterminds make up part of the team that keep all the servers at UANL running smoothly. In 2 days we drilled down in the details needed for them to eventually start testing Windows HPC Server 2008 for an eventual deployment to support various departments. The plan is have a scalable infrastructure up and running to support research activity from grad students in various departments.

Since this was a small group, we quickly turned the training to a round table format, in which we had a constant discussion while touching very important topics when deciding how to setup an HPC cluster in Windows.

Working with them was great, they were a very hospitable and fun to work trio. The last day we delayed the training for a bit to watch México beat France 2-0 in the World Cup, which was a fun game to watch and definitely worth it!

HPC Pack SP2 was released a while back, but if you try and find it, you won’t be able to – what gives? After searching a bit in the Windows HPC Server Job Submission and Scheduling forums, I found the answer:

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.

In a previous post, I cranked up a script using PowerShell and psexec to fix the heat map problems that may happen with Windows HPC Server 2008. The script waited for each node to complete, which could take hours to perform if your cluster is big.

#Uncomment line below if running from a regular PowerShell Window
#Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.HPC"
#Change the HPC-HN value below to match the name of your head node
$HEAD_NODE = "HPC-HN"

#Obtain Compute Nodes
$nodes = Get-HpcNode -GroupName ComputeNodes

Write-Host "Setting Head Node To:" $HEAD_NODE
Set-Content Env:CCP_SCHEDULER $HEAD_NODE
#Stop Head Node Services
Stop-Service -Force HpcManagement
Stop-Service -Force HpcNodeManager
Stop-Service -Force HpcSdm

$services = "HpcManagement", "HpcNodeManager"
#Stop the services on all compute nodes
foreach ($node in $nodes)  {
foreach ($service in $services) {
 $serviceStop = "net stop $service"
 $computer = $node.NetBiosName
 $computer = "\\$computer"
 Write-Host ("Executing command: psexec " + $computer + " " + $serviceStop)
 Start-Process psexec -args ($computer + " " + $serviceStop)
 }
}

Write-Host("Waiting 10 seconds for services to stop")
#Change the value below if you have a large number of nodes
Sleep(10)

foreach ($node in $nodes)  {
foreach ($service in $services) {
 $serviceStart = "net start $service"
 $computer = $node.NetBiosName
 $computer = "\\$computer"
 Write-Host ("Executing command: psexec " + $computer + " " + $serviceStart)
 Start-Process psexec -args ($computer + " " + $serviceStart)
 }
}
Write-Host("Waiting 20 seconds for services to start")
#Change the value below if you have a large number of nodes
Sleep(20)
#Start Services on Head Node
Start-Service HpcManagement
Start-Service HpcNodeManager
Start-Service HpcSdm
Write-Host("Your nodes should show up in the heat map in a about a minute")

Last Friday marked the end of a 3-day event in México City around High Performance Computing for IT Professionals. The attendees learned everything they need to know regarding Windows HPC Server 2008 in terms of setup, scheduling jobs, PowerShell, command line, network topologies, SOA, job templates, node templates, and node groups. The crowd was great to work with, highly-skilled individuals form different backgrounds, some wanting to get their feet wet with this technology, and other experienced folks who wanted to learn more about advanced topics.

This was my first time in México City and it’s unfortunate that I could not stay a bit longer to get to know the city a little better. At least we got to try authentic Mexican food and ate at a legitimate “Taquería” close to the event venue, the “Borrego Viudo” while watching the Mexican soccer team beat Italy in the World Cup:

As a follow-up to our attendees, I would like to communicate the following:

1. Your diplomas for the course completion can be obtained from KED starting June 7th (contact person is Liliana Gutiérrez)
2. If you would like a copy of the training material, please drop me an e-mail and I’ll make sure you get a copy (csaborio at scorpiotek dot com)

Now, off to TechEd NA 2010!