HPC, Virtualization and Random Thoughts

AI goes mainstream in the insurance industry

An interesting post from Milliman notes how machine learning techniques are gaining favour in...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/09/2017

Milliman - Another Aspect

Milliman's story has several facets, as they have been using Azure extensively. Please check...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 07/12/2015

Milliman - an Azure Case Study

Milliman – Cloud Innovators in the Life Insurance Industry Milliman is a great example of a...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 07/12/2015

CentOS cluster in Azure - Part 1

I have been working on Azure Resource Manager templates for a while. They are an interesting way to...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/26/2015

DFS in Azure

Often we want to use Azure's scalable storage to deploy file servers. For geographically...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/17/2015

How Many Cores for the Job?

That is quite a common question. Experienced systems engineers have accumulated knowledge over the...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 09/29/2014

Generic Resource Scheduler for Azure

GeReS (Generic Resource Scheduler) for Windows Azure is now available as a beta release on Codeplex....

Author: gmarchetti Date: 01/14/2014

Python and Azure VMs

I have been experimenting lately with the Azure SDK for Python, in particular with the service...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 06/13/2013

Using CloudBlitz to Submit Jobs

In the second post about Cloudblitz (https://cloudblitz.codeplex.com) we'll examine how to use it to...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/16/2013

Cloudblitz: A Tool to Deploy HPC Clusters in Azure

I'm happy to announce the availability of Cloudblitz, a tool (framework) to deploy HPC clusters in...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/13/2013

Endpoints, firewalls and other annoyances

When you deploy a HPC cluster on Azure, you typically want to run some application in it besides...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 01/05/2012

Getting data and applications to / from Azure

After Wenming’s post on deploying an azure hpc cluster with powershell, I have been looking for an...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 12/13/2011

SQL Server in Windows Azure

It is certainly possible to run SQL Server 2008 R2 in Azure virtual machines, but keep in mind that...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 09/09/2011

Azure Connect - a vpn between Azure and your machines

Azure Connect is a service that lets you establish a vpn tunnel (for want of a better word) between...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 04/18/2011

Azure billing clarification

A quick clarification: Azure allocates resources to your role as long as it is deployed, whether it...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/14/2011

Put a VM on Azure

I have summarized here all the steps you need to take in order to deploy an Azure VM. Step 1: Get...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/12/2011

The Hyper-V Cloud - no clusters?

Microsoft has recently published a set of guides to build your own private cloud solution using...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 11/24/2010

Patches and KB articles for Hyper-v R2

I'd like to share with you some tips to mitigate a few frustrating intermittent problems with...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 11/19/2010

Live Migration, Cluster Shared Volumes & Networks

The recommendation for people setting up live migration clusters is to isolate different kinds of...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 10/01/2009

P2V with SCVMM – a quick tip

System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) has been offering a relatively simple way of doing...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 07/21/2009

VHD Boot

With Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 you get the opportunity to boot directly from a vhd file. The...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 07/14/2009

A Free Book on Microsoft Virtualization

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions from Microsoft Press is available as a FREE...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/12/2009

Updated Infiniband on Server 2008 Paper

I have finally updated my notes on the installation of Infiniband on Windows Server 2008. They now...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/02/2009

Faking Networks

On a Windows HPC Server 2008 head node, that is... 1. No Infiniband on the head node In many cases...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/23/2009

Live Migration in R2

I've got a lot of questions about Live Migration in 2008 R2. Rather than writing a long post on it,...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/12/2009

Turning hyper-v on and off

I use hyper-v on my laptop. When I know I don't need VMs for the day, I can squeeze a bit more...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 12/07/2008

What is new in virtualization with Windows Server 2008 R2?

There are some quite interesting improvements in Windows Server 2008 R2 (what was wrong with W7 as a...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 11/12/2008

Upgrading from an evaluation version

I have received a few questions about upgrades from the evaluation version that you can download...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 11/03/2008

Proxies and Compute Nodes

You’ve prepared your templates, configured your network, your firewalls and everything you could...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 10/22/2008

Upgrading to HPC Server 2008 RC1

Well, there is no upgrade path, so the quickest way is to re-image. Download the RC build of the HPC...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 07/22/2008

I'll be there in 2 microseconds!

Fantastic news! Mellanox has released the beta 2 version of their WinIB 1.4 stack, which works with...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 06/19/2008

Teched session on HPC in top 20!

Phil Pennington and I presented a session on cluster performance optimization at Teched 2008 in...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 06/18/2008

How fast is this thing, really?!

Microsoft entered the HPC market a couple of years ago with a value proposition based on ease of...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 06/18/2008

A Hybrid OS Cluster Solution

Thomas Varlet, of Microsoft France, and Dr. Patrice Calegari, of BULL SAS, have written an excellent...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 06/03/2008

UK HPC User Group Meeting

The UK HPC user group is meeting in London on June 26th, for what promises to be an interesting day...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 06/02/2008

Webcasts Again!

Hey all,I'm doing another series of webcasts. 2 of them have already been aired, two more will...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/23/2008

Affinity

Did you notice that the latest CTP has introduced a new option for mpiexec? Using mpiexec -affinity...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/12/2008

4x4 and other quick tips

I've recently been involved in a simple benchmarking exercise. Here are a few quick "rules of thumb"...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/07/2008

HPC & Movies

In my last post I investigated how HPC can be used to build UFOs. This time, I've learned to my...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 05/01/2008

Interested in HPC? How about UFOs?

To many people HPC is like UFOs: We there's somebody somewhere, but we don't really know what...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/21/2008

Infiniband on HPC Server 2008 - again

After I published a document about the installation of Mellanox Infiniband on Server 2008, I have...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/18/2008

HPC Server 2008 webcasts - again!

Hello again,I'll be doing a series of webcasts soon, hopefully on the feature-complete beta 2 of HPC...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/17/2008

Free Software from Microsoft? I cannot believe it!

But it is true! We have about 20 not-for-resale copies of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 SP1....

Author: gmarchetti Date: 03/04/2008

Mellanox Infiniband on HPC Server 2008

One would assume that Infiniband on Windows is just going to be as easy as any other plug and play...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/28/2008

HPC "Jumpstart" in Washington DC

We're organizing a 1-day introduction to Windows HPC Server 2008 in Washington, DC on March 18th...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/27/2008

Hyper-V and Server 2008 RTM

With general availability of Windows Server 2008 Microsoft ships the beta 1 release of Windows...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/21/2008

HPC Server 2008 screencasts available

I had promised that I would do a series of screencasts illustrating different aspects of HPC Server...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 02/13/2008

Windows Server 2008 High-Availability Clusters

It is no secret that HPC Server 2008 will offer the option to make the head node of a HPC cluster...

Author: gmarchetti Date: 01/22/2008

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