Case Study: Bar‑Ilan University achieves massive-scale Linux HPC crypto-analysis with Microsoft Azure

How Bar Ilan University leveraged Azure HPC for Linux Machines to complete a massive scale crypto-analysis experiment

Bar‑Ilan University, Israel’s second‑largest academic institution, needed to run a Linux‑based crypto‑analysis experiment that would process 128,000 requests per second continuously for two weeks. The team estimated about 5,000 cores were required, an on‑premises capacity impractical for the university.

After evaluating providers, Bar‑Ilan partnered with CloudZone and chose Microsoft Azure (Azure Batch and Azure Cloud Services) to run Linux VMs and parallelize the workload at scale. By using on‑demand and scheduled Azure Batch jobs—without building or managing HPC clusters—the project ran on Azure F‑16 servers with consistent, high performance and completed successfully over the two‑week period.

Bar Ilan University

Assi Barak

Software Group Manager