Microsoft HPC Pack 2016 is now available in Azure

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We are excited to announce today the availability of the Microsoft HPC Pack 2016 in Microsoft Azure.

With this major release, we mark a new milestone in our cloud journey and in our vision to make HPC Pack solutions more reliable and effective for a broad set of users in Azure. Here are some major new features we released in this Azure version:

  • High Availability HPC Cluster in Azure – Enterprise customers of HPC Pack cluster take the HA of workloads running in cluster with very high priority. Starting from HPC Pack 2016, users can easily deploy a new HPC cluster with or without HA with Azure ARM templates. The multiple active HNs will not just make SLA for customer but also provide load balance to the services across the cluster. For more details, please go to this page for guidance.
  • Use AAD to manage HPC Pack cluster in Azure – with the AAD integration with HPC Pack 2016, customers can now directly leverage the AAD authentication to manage the cluster and job schedule. This also gives customers the potential to connect the on-premises AD to AAD to make authentication across the hybrid environment much simple. Please go to this Azure content page for more details.
  • Support N-series GPU VMs in Azure – with the announcement of the N-series of GPU VMs in Azure, HPC Pack will also support to add these GPU capable VMs into the HPC Pack cluster. For how to use HPC Pack cluster to manage the GPU nodes and jobs, please go to the help doc here.
  • Support auto grow/shrink for ARM cluster – in HPC Pack 2016, if customers deploy the cluster with Azure ARM resources, the built-in auto grow/shrink service will be supported. It works the same way as we did in classic Azure resources. For more details, please see the helps doc here.
  • Support new Windows/SQL platforms – we are going to support the latest version of major platforms: Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server 2016.

You can now directly leverage the official sample cluster deployment templates to provision a HPC Pack 2016 cluster in Azure. The HPC Pack image is also available in the Azure marketplace.

Note: We are still working on the HPC Pack 2016 downloadable package releasing. If you want to deploy HPC Pack 2016 manually on your system, please wait for a few weeks. I will also announce it with a new blog post here.

We are in SC16 this week in Salt Lake City. If you are also in town, please come over to have a visit of Microsoft Booth. There are several cool things to exploring out. I am looking forward to talking to you if you have any comments or ideas. And of cause, you can always get in touch with us via Windows HPC forum.