14 DAY TRIAL // Parametric sweep, SOA application and Microsoft Excel offloading are application types for which HPC customers running Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 Service Pack (SP1) can also leverage Windows Azure’s computing power. Microsoft is currently hard at work building Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP2, but it first started enabling the extending of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 with computational resources in Windows Azure added to on-premises clusters with the advent of SP1.
Focusing on the first upgrade for the most recent iteration of Windows for Supercomputers, Microsoft released a collection of resources designed to streamline the process of bursting to Windows Azure from a Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 cluster.
Customers with high performance computing environments can head over to the Download Center and grab the “Windows HPC with Burst to Windows Azure: Application Models and Data Considerations” code samples and whitepaper.
What the software giant is offering is “a technical overview of developing HPC applications that are supported for the Windows Azure burst scenario,” the company said.
“The article addresses the application models that are supported, and the data issues that arise when working with Windows Azure and on-premises nodes, such as the proper location for the data, the storage types in Windows Azure, various techniques to upload data to Windows Azure storage, and how to access data from the computational nodes in the cluster (on-premises and Windows Azure).
“Finally, this article describes how to deploy HPC applications to Windows Azure nodes and how to run these HPC applications from client applications, as well as from the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 job submission interfaces,” Microsoft added.
The documentation provided free of charge by Microsoft details application models, data considerations, and deployment steps necessary for bursting to Windows Azure from a Windows HPC.
Essentially, customers can have a few types of high performance apps deployed to Windows Azure nodes, provided that they’re running Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1.
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 is available for download here.
Windows 7 SP1 RTM and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RTM are available for download here.