However, as we touched on in our original blog post, using HPC Pack may not be the best choice if you are getting started with MPI and simply want to spin up a new MPI cluster, test your application, and then shut everything back down again. On the HPC front, there is a handy HPC Pack example available that can be used to provision and set up the scheduler. Deploying an application is literally as simple as clicking a Deploy to Azure button and filling in a few template parameter values. The Azure Quickstart Templates project on Github is a great resource for finding ARM templates. All in all, however, ARM deployments are much easier to manage than Classic ones. Both services suffer from trying to support programming logic from within json. Dealing with conditional resource deployment, however, is clunkier in ARM templates than in CloudFormation. There are some additional niceties here though such as being able to specify loops in the template. Azure Resource Manager is essentially the equivalent of CloudFormation on AWS. This can make deploying a new cluster or application much faster than the old model.

Dependencies can be defined between resources and the Resource Manager is smart enough to parallelize resource deployment where it can. Azure Resource Manager allows clients to submit a declarative template written in json that defines all of the cloud resources such as VMs, load balancers, and network interfaces, that need to be created as part of an application or cluster. Microsoft now recommends that all new deployments use Azure Resource Manager (ARM). Azure has undergone a lot of changes since that time and we thought it would be worth revisiting this topic to see what the current landscape looks like for running Windows MPI applications in the cloud.įirst, Cloud Services and the so-called “IaaS v1 Virtual Machines” have been relegated to “Classic” status in the Azure portal. It has been about a year and a half since we released a reusable Azure Cloud Service for provisioning a simple Windows MS-MPI cluster without having to install HPC Pack.

Install Mpi On Windows 7