What's Coming for HPC with Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 will be released in Aug. 2012 and be generally available in Sept. 2012, but there will not be a special HPC edition as for past releases. However, in order to continue to provide an HPC solution to customers, Microsoft has said that it plans to release a single, free HPC Pack 2012 that customers can use to create an HPC installation. The HPC Pack 2012 can be installed on any Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter edition and used as the head node. The HPC Pack 2012 can then also be installed on other Windows Server 2012 servers, or Windows 7 workstations to be used as compute nodes. The HPC Pack 2012 will support all the functionality that was previously included in HPC Pack 2008 R2 Express, Enterprise, for Workstations, and for Cycle Harvesting editions.

The change means that customers will no longer have to license a special HPC edition of Windows server or license the HPC Pack, giving them an essentially “free” HPC option. (The underlying OS must still be appropriately licensed.)