[Hosting HPC in Azure] 1 -- CycleCloud Wizard

How to?

Step 1 – Create VM to Host CycleCloud Wizard

Go to Microsoft Learning Center – CycleCloud Quick Start: Install CycleCloud using the Marketplace image.

The recommended system requirements:

• A 64-bit Linux distribution
• Java Runtime Environment (version 8)
• At least 8 GB of RAM (16 GB recommended)
• Four or more CPU cores
• At least 250 GB of free disk space

Get the public ip and open a browser: https://<public-ip>

The wizard will ask you to create an admin account. Do not named your account admin or name (ex: root) that are default settings in Linux. These accounts will be added to cluster as users.

Step 2 – Add Subscription for CycleCloud Wizard

We will need to add a billing account and also delegate the creating/deleteing resources operation to an app, that has the permission to do so on behave of CycleCloud Wizard.

1. The CycleCloud Wizard will ask you to fill in details in Orchestrator Configuration:

   Form	How to
   Authentication	Select App Registration
   Subscription ID	Subscription ID
   Tenant ID	Tenant ID, Application ID, Application Secret
   Application ID	Tenant ID, Application ID, Application Secret
   Application Secret	Tenant ID, Application ID, Application Secret

   Click Validate Credentials to make the dropdown box have effect.

   Form	How to
   Region	Select default region where the resource should place at.
   Resource group	If it is a newly created resource group, it might take a while for it to show up here. Remember to Grant Contributor Role to the App.

2. Fill in details in Locker Configuration:

   Form	How to
   Authentication	Select Use shared access key for storage access
   Storage Account	Choose a storage account, if you don’t have one then create one.
   Storage Container	Like a folder name under the storage account.

Subscription ID

A subscription is a billing account.

Go to Azure Portal -> Subscriptions -> Subscription ID

Tenant ID, Application ID, Application Secret

1. Go to Azure Portal upper left menu select Entra.
2. Copy the Tenant ID at the home page.

3. Go to the left side bar, select App registrations -> New registration

   Form	How to
   Name	Application name app (or whatever name)
   Supported account types	Choose Single tenant only
   Redirect URI	(ignore)

4. Go to App registrations -> All applications, select the app we have just created. Find Application (client) ID.
5. Under this newly created app registration, go to left panel Certificates & secrets -> Client secrets -> New client secret
6. Copy the Value, this is the Application Secret.

Grant Contributor Role to the App

We have to grant contributor role to the app we created in previous subsection.

1. Go to Azure Portal -> Resource Groups -> Access Control (IAM)
2. Top bar Role assignments -> Add -> Add role assignment
   • Role: Select Privileged administrator roles -> Contributor
   • Members: Select User, group, or service princial and Select members, search the name of the app.

Step 3 – CycleCloud

Because CycleCloud uses self-signed SSL, the browser is showing Not secure, which is fine.