Introduction

Lately I’ve been experimenting a bit with AI agents and investigating ways in which they can take advantage of HPC workflows hosted on an HPCBOX cluster. One potential way I thought of, was to have an MCP server which can allow AI agents to interact with an HPCBOX cluster. This post summarizes my experimentation and will be updated as I make further progress.

Design

HPCBOX has a Web Workflow service (in preview on Microsoft Azure) which can be used to deploy handcrafted HPC workflows and make them available to external systems like Microsoft Power Automate etc. My current approach is to enhance this service with an MCP endpoint and let AI agents use this MCP server to learn about hosted HPC workflows in HPCBOX and interact with them effectively.

Authentication and Authorization

The HPCBOX Web Workflow Service uses OAuth to authenticate users with the Azure AD service associated with the user’s Azure tenant. The HPCBOX Web MCP server uses the same Authentication mechanism and this makes it possible to control access to workflow executions and their associated results.

AI Agent

Although initially I used Cursor’s built in AI Agent to interact with the MCP server, I could not get it to authenticate using OAuth once the MCP server authentication layer was implemented. Therefore, I switched to VS Code’s Copilot Agent to continue my development and tests.

Interactions

The following sections list the AI Agent interactions I’ve been testing. Some of them are yet to be implemented and tested on the MCP server side and will be updated as I make further progress.

Listing Available HPC workflows on the HPCBOX Cluster

The AI Agent was easily able to interact with the HPCBOX cluster and list the available workflows along with a summary of what each workflow was supposed to achieve.

Summary Of Past Workflow Executions

The AI Agent was able to quickly retrieve and summarize the past HPCBOX workflow executions I’d performed on this test and demo HPCBOX cluster.

Details of specific Execution

The AI agent was able to easily retrieve details of one specific HPC Workflow execution using its ID from the previous workflows list context.

Retrieve HPC Workflow output (TBD)

Summarize HPC Workflow results (TBD)

AI Agent interaction with HPCBOX - YouTube

AI Agent interaction with HPCBOX

Drizti Inc.12 subscribers

2026-03-30: Over time, there’s been a pivot on how and where to include AI capabilities to empower users in HPCBOX. The new approach is described in the follow-up to this blog post here.