Benchmarking Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines for the use of HPC applications

In this paper, we present the results of performance analysis for the Microsoft Azure virtual machines. The tests used NASA’s well known NAS parallel benchmarks for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Several tests were executed using different HPC cluster configuration. Both computation and communication times were measured to study the effect of Virtual Machines (VMs) computing and networking features on the execution and communication time of the benchmarks. We concluded that the communication behavior of any benchmark or application has the most influence on the HPC cluster configuration selection.