Scalability and communication performance of HPC on Azure Cloud

Different domains of research are moving to cloud computing whether to carry out compute intensive experiments or to store large datasets. Cloud computing services allow the users to focus on the application, without being concerned about the physical resources. HPC system on the cloud is desired for their high needs of efficient CPU computations. Our objective was to evaluate the scalability and performance of High Performance Cloud Computing on Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure by using well known Benchmarks, namely, IMB point-to-point communication and NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB). In our experiments, performance of the HPC applications on the cloud is assessed in terms of MOPS and speedup, and is tested under different configurations of cluster sizes. Also, point-to point communication performance between nodes is assessed in terms of latency and bandwidth as a function of message size. (C) 2015 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).