Hello HPC Fans. A few weeks ago we updated our images on Microsoft Azure to 8.5. Today we are proud to announce the general availability of AlmaLinux OS for Azure HPC based on AlmaLinux OS 8.5. This was a tremendous team effort starting from community requests and developed in collaboration between the AlmaLinux community and the team over at our amazing sponsors Microsoft Azure.
We had a couple of goals when we set out on this project. First, is to further enable scientific computing and research. That is something that we feel very strongly about and many across the vast expanse of scientific research have begun to start leveraging the cloud due to the lack of resource constraints there. It is much easier to do you work whether it be simulations or something else if you can add nodes instantly with a quick command in your terminal. Second, HPC is often out of reach for many due to the large investment that is typically required. Combining the benefits of cloud economies-of-scale along with HPC technology opens the door for many to be able to experience what HPC is and what it really do. We hope that it will inspire those already there to explore what more they can accomplish and inspire the next generation of scientists and researchers to begin experimenting.
You can now take advantage of Azure’s leading edge H-series CPU and N-series GPU based instances, along with RDMA support and low latency networking to power all of your cloud-based HPC workloads large scale computation, circuit design, fluid dynamic analysis, natural resource exploration and many other HPC workloads.
The image includes a suite of the most popular HPC tools and libraries pre-installed including the NVIDIA/Mellanox OFED drivers, InfiniBand-based MPI Libraries such as HPC-X and OpenMPI, Communication runtimes Libfabric and OpenUCX, AMD BLIS, FFTW and FLAME libraries, Intel oneAPI Math Kernel Library, and a host of other domain-specific libraries and utilities.
Join us. Our team is always on the lookout for more contributors. Report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker. Join the AlmaLinux Community Chat or our HPC Forum if you need any help, post a question, or even if you just want to hang out. Reach us on Reddit and on Twitter.
–Happy Hacking