HPC Lift and Shift Cloud Migration: Architecture and Best Practices

Have you ever wondered what it takes to have an enterprise-grade HPC environment in the cloud? What components do I need and what steps do I need to take to move from an on-premises environment to a cloud environment? And what are the best practices in this process? It all starts with a proof of concept (PoC). In a PoC, an organization evaluates how key applications will perform in the cloud, considering not only performance but also associated costs. Once the decision has been made, it is important to understand what is needed to have an enterprise-grade HPC cloud environment.

Based on our experience with a variety of clients, partners, and product groups, we have written a comprehensive article on HPC Lift and Shift Cloud Migration, and this blog post provides an overview of what the article covers. We will continue to improve our documentation over time, so feedback is always welcome.

TL;DR

– We just released detailed documentation on HPC Lift and Shift Cloud Migration with components, steps, examples, and best practices. It also provides references to products, code repositories, and blog posts.

– Documentation can be accessed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/high-performance-computing/lift-and-shift-overview

Document Overview

This provides an overview of the document. link

On-premise. The article begins by describing a typical on-premises HPC environment where compute nodes, job schedulers such as SLURM, PBS, or LSF, identity management, storage options, and monitoring tools are all hosted within a private network.

Persona. After discussing the on-premises environment, we talk about personas. In our experience, we have observed many discussions about what changes and what does not change for everyone involved when moving from on-premises to the cloud. We consider the following four personas and discuss their responsibilities and new tasks in an HPC Cloud setting.

– End users (engineers/scientists/researchers)

– HPC Manager

– Cloud Manager

– Business Manager/Owner

HPC cloud target architecture. The following discussion is an overview of the target HPC cloud architecture, emphasizing that there are no significant changes compared to the on-premises environment in terms of the conceptual components involved. One of the key differentiators is that resources are allocated on demand, allowing users to access more resources as needed.

Migration guide. After briefly discussing how to navigate a cloud environment through a proof of concept (PoC), we dive deeper into the migration guide itself. We’ve divided the guide into five steps.

1. Basic infrastructure. The focus here is on setting up the resource groups, networking, and underlying storage that serve as the backbone of a successful HPC lift-and-shift deployment.

2. Basic service. This section covers the core components associated with the Task Scheduler, including the Resource Coordinator for provisioning and configuring resources, identity management for user authentication, monitoring (including node health checks), and accounting to better understand resource health and usage. Each component plays a critical role in ensuring the performance, scalability, and security of your HPC environment.

3. save. This section highlights important considerations for managing storage in HPC cloud environments, focusing on different cloud storage options and data migration processes. It also provides practical guidance on setting up storage and managing data migration, with a focus on scalability and automation as HPC environments evolve.

4. Compute Node. This section provides guidance on how to efficiently select and manage compute resources for HPC workloads in the cloud, including some recommendations and pointers on VM images.

5. End user entry point. This section explores user interaction options and highlights the importance of addressing potential latency issues that may arise when moving to the cloud. It also provides guidance on tools, services, and best practices to optimize user entry points for HPC lift-and-shift deployments. A quickstart setup is included to help you efficiently set up this component with the goal of automating it as your cloud infrastructure matures.

What’s next?

We will continue to improve and expand our documentation on this topic as new services, products, and learning become available. This document does not aim to cover every possible deployment in the cloud, but provides guidance based on patterns we have observed in how customers use the cloud to run HPC workloads. If there’s a topic you’d like more details on, send me a note!

Full document link

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/high-performance-computing/lift-and-shift-overview

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