What's New in HPC Pack 2019 Update 2

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This document lists the new features and changes that are available in Microsoft HPC Pack 2019 Update 2.

Operating system and software requirements

HPC Pack 2019 Update 2 has an updated set of requirements for operating system and other prerequisite software.

Note

HPC Pack 2019 has supported Windows Server 2022 since HPC Pack 2019 Update 1. Windows Server 2022 is supported for head node role only with .Net Framework 4.8 cumulative update August 9, 2022-KB5015733 or later applied to all cluster nodes and clients on Windows Server 2022.

Enhancements to Job Scheduler

  • Resolved long-running task failure during head node failover

  • Reduced recovery time for highly available head nodes

  • Fixed unreachable nodes issue due to heartbeat hang when head nodes fail over

  • Added support for HPC_CREATESESSION, allowing tasks to run in a user session without RDP to compute nodes beforehand - Users may specify job environment HPC_CREATESESSION equals True so the job will run under a user session if exists or it would create the user session and run job in it

  • Fixed utilization over 100% issue caused by null task allocation end time

  • Corrected cluster metric counters with highly available head nodes

  • Addressed an issue that job may get stuck when DB transaction timed out but actually succeeded

  • Fixed an issue that job may fail to shrink resource when it has task dependencies

  • Resolved regression preventing IP address usage as the scheduler name

  • Fixed an issue that node could be stuck in draining state due to a divide by zero error when removing the node

  • Introduced support for single node tasks - To enable this feature,

    • Set the scheduler feature flag and restart HpcScheduler service on all head nodes
    Set-HpcClusterProperty -SchedulerEnvFeatureFlags 'TASK_ON_SINGLE_NODE'
    • Set job environment. E.g.
    job submit /numcores:5-5 /jobenv:CCP_TASK_ON_SINGLE_NODE=True hostname

  • Introduced support min and max cores for job and task on a node - To enable this feature,

    • Set the scheduler feature flag and restart HpcScheduler service on all head nodes
    Set-HpcClusterProperty -SchedulerEnvFeatureFlags 'MIN_MAX_ON_NODE'
    • Set job and task environment. E.g.
    job new /numcores:8-8 /jobenv:CCP_JOB_MIN_MAX_ON_NODE=4-4
job add !! /numcores:4-4 /env:CCP_TASK_MIN_MAX_ON_NODE=2-2 hostname

  • Extended job activation and submission filter timeouts from 3 to 10 minutes

  • Increased maximum project name length from 80 to 128 characters

  • Improved speed for job task dependency validation

Improvements to Setup and Management

  • Replaced ADAL with MSAL for Azure authentication
  • Migrated from Azure AD Graph to Microsoft Graph
  • Added configurable Azure VM Create/Start Timeout
  • Fixed BadRequest error when creating AAD service principal with HPC Cluster Manager
  • Resolved ModelUpdate object leaks
  • Addressed large IaaS VM deployment issue by partitioning Start/Stop operations into multiple changes
  • Set DB recovery mode to Simple for HPCHAWitness and HPCHAStorage databases to reduce DB size
  • Enabled integrated Windows authentication for SQL server in cases where domain user check failed
  • Added support for more recent Linux distributions

SOA Runtime and Excel

  • Fixed slow Excel job execution due to leftover auto recovery files
  • Resolved SOA broker worker crash caused by unhandled exception in rare conditions

UI & SDK

  • Fixed task environment variable cleanup issue when copying jobs from GUI
  • Resolved GUI hang issue caused by excessive project names
  • Fixed UI crash due to service-side NullReferenceException
  • Added waitState parameter for scheduler job/task submit API to enable fast submission