[ppog]

Yes, this is possible. The Azure A8-A11 VMs have Infiniband, as do the 'r' (RDMA) variants of the new H series. Azure Batch includes support for MPI-like runtimes although you need to get the MPI runtime and application onto the virtual cluster yourself. There's documentation for it here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/bat... and some more Linux-focused material here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/windowshpc/2016/07/20/in...

Disclosure: I'm an Azure Batch engineer.