Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 enables administrators to increase the power of
the on-premises cluster by adding computational resources in Windows Azure. With
the Windows Azure “burst” scenario, various types of HPC applications can be
deployed to Windows Azure nodes and run on these nodes in the same way they run
in on-premises nodes.

The article provides a technical overview of developing HPC
applications that are supported for the Windows Azure burst scenario. The
article addresses the application models that are supported, and the data issues
that arise when working with Windows Azure and on-premises nodes, such as the
proper location for the data, the storage types in Windows Azure, various
techniques to upload data to Windows Azure storage, and how to access data from
the computational nodes in the cluster (on-premises and Windows Azure). Finally,
this article describes how to deploy HPC applications to Windows Azure nodes and
how to run these HPC applications from client applications, as well as from the
Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 job submission interfaces.