Azure VM Cluster (via Dask)#
Create a Cluster using Dask Cloud Provider#
The easiest way to setup a multi-node, multi-GPU cluster on Azure is to use Dask Cloud Provider.
1. Install Dask Cloud Provider#
Dask Cloud Provider can be installed via conda or pip. The Azure-specific capabilities will need to be installed via the [azure] pip extra.
$ pip install dask-cloudprovider[azure]
2. Configure your Azure Resources#
Set up your Azure Resource Group, Virtual Network, and Security Group according to Dask Cloud Provider instructions.
3. Create a Cluster#
In Python terminal, a cluster can be created using the dask_cloudprovider package. The below example creates a cluster with 2 workers in westus2 with Standard_NC12s_v3 VMs. The VMs should have at least 100GB of disk space in order to accommodate the RAPIDS container image and related dependencies.
from dask_cloudprovider.azure import AzureVMCluster
resource_group = "<RESOURCE_GROUP>"
vnet = "<VNET>"
security_group = "<SECURITY_GROUP>"
subscription_id = "<SUBSCRIPTION_ID>"
cluster = AzureVMCluster(
resource_group=resource_group,
vnet=vnet,
security_group=security_group,
subscription_id=subscription_id,
location="westus2",
vm_size="Standard_NC12s_v3",
public_ingress=True,
disk_size=100,
n_workers=2,
worker_class="dask_cuda.CUDAWorker",
docker_image="nvcr.io/nvidia/rapidsai/base:25.08-cuda12.8-py3.12",
docker_args="-p 8787:8787 -p 8786:8786",
)
4. Test RAPIDS#
To test RAPIDS, create a distributed client for the cluster and query for the GPU model.
from dask.distributed import Client
client = Client(cluster)
def get_gpu_model():
import pynvml
pynvml.nvmlInit()
return pynvml.nvmlDeviceGetName(pynvml.nvmlDeviceGetHandleByIndex(0))
client.submit(get_gpu_model).result()
Out[5]: b'Tesla V100-PCIE-16GB'
5. Cleanup#
Once done with the cluster, ensure the cluster and client are closed:
client.close()
cluster.close()