Earlier today at the High Performance Computing (HPC) in Financial Markets Conference in New York, Microsoft announced the immediate availability of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2.  In addition to describing the benefits of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, Bill Hilf, general manager of the Microsoft Technical Computing Group, also showcased upcoming capabilities in Windows HPC Server that will allow customers to provision and manage HPC nodes in Windows Azure from within on-premise server clusters.  This new feature will enable customers to “burst” HPC workloads from their on-premise datacenters to the cloud for elastic, just-in-time processing power. 

To watch a step-by-step demo of an HPC server cluster using Windows Azure nodes, including policies, scheduling, node sizing and provisioning, please advance to 50:24 of today’s keynote here.

You can also read more about the Windows HPC Server R2 announcement in a blog post from the Windows Server team here or read Bill’s blog post about the potential of HPC in the cloud here.

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