Getting started with MS-MPI on Azure

In the evolving landscape of Azure Cloud Services, Microsoft has transitioned from "Classic" resources to the Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which simplifies the deployment of Windows MPI applications by allowing users to submit declarative JSON templates defining necessary cloud resources. ARM, akin to AWS's CloudFormation, offers advantages like parallelized resource deployment, although it presents challenges with conditional resource deployment due to JSON's limitations. For high-performance computing (HPC), Azure offers the HPC Pack and Azure Batch service, with the latter recently supporting multi-instance MPI tasks on VM pools, albeit requiring developer familiarity. A new ARM template has been devised to facilitate the deployment of a basic Windows MPI cluster without the HPC Pack's overhead, supporting SSH for remote access and simplifying MPI job execution on Azure. This approach aims to provide a more accessible entry point for users beginning with MS-MPI, featuring easy deployment via GitHub and enabling both command line and GUI access options.