HPC containers with Azure Batch

With the https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-batch-updates-october2017/ to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/batch/, you now have the option to schedule your tasks as Docker container invocations. Containers and Azure Batch are an ideal way to package, execute, and scale your High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and batch workloads in a consistent, reproducible manner utilizing powerful cloud native job scheduling capabilities.

 

Today, we're excited to announce support for http://singularity.lbl.gov/ in the latest https://github.com/Azure/batch-shipyard/releases. Singularity is a container solution amenable to both administrators and users of shared HPC and cluster computing environments, while still providing access to accelerators such as GPUs and specialized interconnects in container contexts. https://github.com/Azure/batch-shipyard is an open system for enabling simple, configuration-based container execution on Azure Batch, and aims to allow users of these shared computing environments to easily execute their existing Singularity workloads on Azure. Azure's https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/sizes-gpu, includinghttps://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-gpus-coming-to-azure-accelerate-hpc-and-ai-workloads/ND, NCv2, and the upcoming NCv3 series of VMs, and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/sizes-hpc-enabled instances are potentially an ideal fit for such workloads. Also, with Batch Shipyard and Azure Batch, not only can you http://batch-shipyard.readthedocs.io/en/latest/30-batch-shipyard-autoscale/ your compute pools with ease, you can also opt to execute your workloads on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/batch/batch-low-pri-vms for savings up to 80%!

 

 

Read about it in the https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/hpc-containers-with-azure-batch/.