Windows Azure is a powerful cloud computing solution that can significantly improve your access to high performance computing (HPC) resources and applications. This tutorial will help you fit Windows Azure into your workflow by guiding you through the straightforward process of migrating a parallel HPC application from Linux to Windows Azure. Welcome! Soon you’ll be running parallel HPC applications in the cloud.

We will be migrating the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) to Windows Azure. POP forms the ocean component of the CCSM, one of the world’s premier climate models. Many other parallel HPC programs have build and execute procedures similar to POP’s, so this tutorial is easily generalized to other programs. If you’re just looking for a binary distribution of POP for Windows, skip to the downloads section of the tutorial summary.

This video was produced by CRIEPI and NCAR researchers running POP at very high resolutions on Japan’s Earth Simulator supercomputer.
After this tutorial, you will be able to run similar simulations on Windows Azure.

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This work was sponsored by the Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism Team and nCore Design.

1.1. Overview and Navigation

Use the slideshow navigation controls next to the page title and the links at the bottom of the page to navigate through the tutorial. Click here if you prefer to view the whole tutorial as a single, printable document.

This tutorial will take between two and four hours to complete and consists of the following steps:

  1. Prepare all required libraries

  2. Port POP from Linux to Windows

  3. Deploy a new Windows Azure compute cluster service

  4. Run POP on Windows Azure and view the results

  5. Tutorial Summary and Downloads

Continue to Step1: Prepare all required libraries when you are ready to begin.