Windows #Azure HPC Burst training course now online

  • Article

If you are familiar with Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, and wish to learn how to use the Azure burst scenario, the training kit for you is now online. Details covered in this course are described in the article Windows HPC with Burst to Windows Azure: Application Models and Data Considerations.

There are three primary burst models that are in the current training:

 

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Parametric Sweep

Parametric sweep provides a straightforward development path for solving delightfully parallel problems on a cluster (sometimes referred to as "embarrassingly parallel" problems, which have no data interdependencies or shared state precluding linear scaling through parallelization). For example, prime numbers calculation for a large range of numbers. Parametric sweep applications run multiple instances of the same program on different sets of input data, stored in a series of indexed storage items, such as files on disk or rows in a database table. Each instance of a parametric sweep application runs as a separate task, and many such tasks can execute concurrently, depending on the amount of available cluster resources.

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SOA

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style designed for building distributed systems. The SOA actors are services: independent software packages that expose their functionality by receiving data (requests) and returning data (responses). SOA is designed to support the distribution of an application across computers and networks, which makes it a natural candidate for scaling on a cluster. The SOA support provided by Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 is based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), a .NET framework for building distributed applications. Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 improves SOA support by hosting WCF services inside Windows Azure nodes, in addition to on-premises nodes.

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Excel Offloading

The execution of compute intensive Microsoft Excel workbooks with independent calculations can be sometimes scaled using a cluster. The Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 integration with Windows Azure supports User Defined Functions (UDFs) offloading. Excel workbook calculations that are based on UDFs defined in an XLL file can be installed on the cluster’s nodes (on-premises and/or Windows Azure nodes). With the XLL installed on the cluster, the user can perform the UDF calls remotely on the cluster instead of locally on the machine where the Excel workbook is open.

Other links:

Excel specific: