VolkerW's WebLog

We sold our house and bought this somewhat older place in Kirkland. It is a 54 year old house, nice floor plan, lots of fixing required too. All appliances stayed. Including a also somewhat older GE oven. The oven is in almost perfect condition and I consider keeping it for a while.  Granted, it is old and not state of the art but it looks really nice and has wonderfully been maintained by the previous owner.

Be it as it may, I don't have any documentation for it and could not find any on the web. Maybe you know where I might find - online or offline - the appropriate docs. Any help is appreciated!

On the front it says  General Electric P7 Automatic Oven Cleaning. I took a few pictures that you can browse here. The model no is: J RP03 007AD.

Thanks.

Wenming - our newest team member on the HPC evangelism team in Redmond - just started his HPC blog on MSDN.

You can read his Problogue here.

The blogs on windowshpc.net are picking up steam. Great to see more and more folks from the product group starting to post!

I missed one from a few days ago but wanted to bring it to your attention anyway. Yutong Sun posted a blog entry about using Hyper-V virtual machines to set up a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. 

The document attached to the post (over 30 pages with plenty screenshots) outlines in detail how to get a cluster set up and running in virtual machines. It nicely ties together 2 cool "technologies", virtualization and HPC.

In case you have a spare Mac Mini, here's a bunch of videos about how to turn a Mac Mini into a Windows Server Virtualization host.

Over at windowshpc.net Barndawgie (?) has written a great post about scheduling jobs for a Windows HPC cluster via templates.

So called Job templates are by no means something new, so why even bother to blog about it? Well, turns out the product group has received a lot of questions about how to use them.

In the post you will find answers about

• What's a job template?
• How do they work?
• How (in detail) to use?

Great post. Please also pay attention to Barndawgie's content about HPC jobs on the Windows HPC platform:

• on
windowshpc.net
• on the forums

You all know Virtual Labs, right? If not, here are the first four good reasons to get them to know better. Jason just posted the first 4 labs about Windows Server 2008 technologies. And more to come!

New to Virtual Labs? Here's the gist from about the portal:

"Try out products in a virtual online environment. In 90 minutes or less, evaluate and test some of Microsoft's newest products through a series of guided, hands-on labs. Download a manual and get started now."

Jason's labs are:

• MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Access Rights, Impersonation
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Impact of Code Signing
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Installer Detection
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Windows Server 2008 - Session 0 Isolation

Wohoo. Thanks for reading on despite the corny post title.

Adam and Joey are in Vegas ... working. Working like crazy to feed the Edge. Microsoft is currently holding the annual Microsoft Management Summit at the Venetian.

Obviously a must for our IT Pro evangelism team from corp. Being at the event and shooting a hell of a lot of interesting videos. Don't miss any of them. How? Go to http://edge.technet.com and search for "MMS 2008" or use this link.

Obviously not wasting any time the guys already sneaked into the keynote room to see what going on backstage. Check it out.

BTW, I have never been to Vegas in the 5 years I am working at Microsoft Corp. now. Shame on me.

May is the month of HPC webcasts focusing on several aspects of Windows HPC Server 2008 and beyond. Please pay attention to these webcasts:

• 5/9/2008 08:00 AM: Windows HPC Server 2008: Management and Diagnostics in High-Performance Computing (Level 200), Giovanni Marchetti 
• 5/23/2008 08:00 AM: Windows HPC Server 2008: High Availability and Diagnostics for High-Performance Computing (Level 200), Giovanni Marchetti
• 5/30/2008 09:30 AM: Windows HPC Server 2008: Job Scheduler and SOA in High-Performance Computing (Level 200), , Giovanni Marchetti
  
• 5/13/2008 08:00 AM: Future of Multi/Many-Core and the Convergence of Client and Cluster in Parallel Computing (Level 300), Phil Pennington and Jason Olson will present on current efforts to develop a unified parallel programming model.

Please click on the links to register.

Windows Server 2008 introduces Transactional NTFS or TxF for short. TxF extend transactions to the NTFS file system. TxF can participate in distributed transactions that the Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) coordinates.

TxF has a native code API only. Jason on our team has been evangelizing TxF as part of this role as server evangelist.
To learn more about the features and functionality of TxF Jason implemented a rudimentary manage code wrapper. The code has now been released to MSDN Code Gallery. Read more on Jason's blog.

The guys at Edge really have chutzpa. Don't know if they still have a job though. They have leaked a secret new product. If you go now, it might still be on the homepage: edge.technet.com.

Ben just pointed to a page on AMD's website containing valuable processor related tools for free download. The one of importance here is obviously an "AMD Virtualization™ Technology and Microsoft® Hyper-V™ System Compatibility Check Utility." Who said only Microsoft comes up with "interesting" names for products.

Info about the tool: "This utility checks your system’s capabilities to facilitate testing of Microsoft Hyper-V on platforms with AMD microprocessors."

Depending on who you are, the work sucker has a different meaning.
Today I have seen a SuperSucker:

Giovanni has put together an excellent document highlighting a specific industry and how it leverages high performance computing (HPC). He also explains what Microsoft has got to do with it and why Microsoft is a perfect match with its set of platforms and technologies.

Check out his post "HPC and UFOs Explained!" on Edge.

Best thing you can do to a Mac Mini? No, wait, certainly not the right way to start this post.

I am going prepare a Mac Mini in such a way that you will be able to install a 2 or more node HPC cluster and a head node. Once you followed the steps outlined in the videos you will be able to install a fully functional HPC cluster environment, literally a cluster-in-one-box. This post covers all aspects from reinstalling the Mac OS with fewer options, using less space on the disk to a Boot Camp installation of Windows Server 2008 and configuring Hyper-V. The final steps necessary to install the HPC cluster software are outlined in Giovanni's document on windowshpc.net.

Why this exercise? Because the small form factor of a Mac Mini makes it an easy to carry demo system and/or a sweet little cluster-in-a-box for testing and development.

Instead of writing up the process and posting screenshots, I screen-recorded all the major events of the installation and configuration. if you just try to do some of the stuff I did or have a different hardware, each individual video should make sense by itself.

Here's the hardware and software I use to record the screens and do the narration:

The server hardware

• 1x Mac Mini
  • Core 2 Duo
  • 4 GB memory (yes, I opened the case voiding the warranty)
  • 160 GB hard disk (seemed enough for my purposes)
  • Bluetooth, USB2, FireWire, 802.11G, GigE
• 1x PC keyboard
• 1x Microsoft Notebook Optical Mouse
• I used Media Encoder's input window as screen (no physical screen necessary)
• Mac OS install DVDs
• A bunch of cables

The recording equipment

• 1x HP Compaq dc7700 Ultra-slim Desktop
• 1x Epiphan DVi2USB frame grabber
• 1x mouse
• 1x keyboard
• More cable
• Windows Vista
• Windows Media Encoder
• Windows Movie Maker

BTW, I will upload the videos to TechNet Edge for streaming as soon as my account has been enabled. I tried YouTube and SoapBox but both re-encode the videos making it impossible to identify anything. Way too blurry for screencasts. For now the videos are in a public folder on SkyDrive.

Preparation is everything

Being an MSDN subscriber I downloaded the ISO image for Windows Server 2008 from MSDN and burned it on a DVD using Roxio's Creator Basic which came with the HP desktop. Unfortunately that image did not boot properly on the Mac Mini. Took a while to find out that there's something wrong with the way the files are augmented on the DVD.

I found a blog post that did work like a charm for me. I followed it step by step and ended up with a perfectly bootable DVD even though the post is meant to be for Vista.

The whole prep work, software installation and cutting the video (110 minutes) into more digestible pieces took about 6 hours last night. Instead of posting one large video I cut it into four more manageable pieces. The four individual videos represent the four major steps it took to install Windows Server 2008 on the Mac hardware.

The four videos are

Installing Mac OS X Leopard on the Mac Mini [wmv] [mp4]

I had to reinstall the Mac OS due to the fact that I screwed up the original installation the system shipped with. I did so much disk partitioning and repartitioning that the volume was in serious conditions and required reinstall. I also wanted to keep a minimal Mac OS installation on the hard drive. Just in case.

Configuring the Boot Camp partition [wmv] [mp4]

Boot Camp is the feature that Apple provides to build a partition on a Mac hard disk to install Windows or any other OS side-by-side with the original OS.

Installation of Windows Server 2008 [wmv] [mp4]

That's the easy part. This video shows how to get Windows Server 2008 installed and working on Mac hardware. While this is the longest video, the installation is uneventful. Of course it just works.

Configuring the Hyper-V (Virtualization) role on Windows Server 2008 [wmv] [mp4]

Self-explanatory. Once you have Windows Server 2008 running, it is just a matter of a few clicks and a reboot to get Hyper-V running.

After your virtualization host running, it is just a matter of following Giovanni's guidelines to have an HPC cluster based on Windows Server 2008 running on your Mac Mini. And if you want to run Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, it will work too.

Enjoy.

UPDATE: The videos are now also available on TechNet Edge.

Technorati Tags: Mac Mini,Hyper-V,Windows HPC Server 2008,Windows Server 2008,Virtualization

YES, RC0 of the Microsoft virtualization solution Hyper-V is available for download. John Howard has an excellent and extensive blog post about the details.

Please pay close attention to his post and read 'til the end before you install the bits! It is important to follow the steps outlines in John's post, that's why I won't share the download links here.

More details also on the Windows Server Division weblog: Hyper-V: It’s all coming together

Enjoy!

Just in case you missed this:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/mar08/03-18UPCRCPR.mspx

Today Microsoft and Intel announced a joint initiative to fund two universal parallel programming research centers. One will be located at UC Berkeley, the second will be at the University of Illinois.

From the press release:

Intel Corporation and Microsoft Corp. are partnering with academia to create two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC), aimed at accelerating developments in mainstream parallel computing, for consumers and businesses in desktop and mobile computing.

The joint funding is $20M over the next 5 yrs.

A substantial investment into the future. Future hardware and future generations of developers.