High-Performance Computing Virtual Machines are now available in West US 2, East US
Published date: 06 June, 2019
HC-series Virtual Machines, designed to provide supercomputer-grade performance and scalability with the best price-performance on the public cloud, are now generally available in West US 2 and East US.
A single HC VM will perform 2-3x faster than the servers most HPC customers have in their on-premises datacenters today. Customers can also run MPI-based HPC applications across up to 300 VMs and 13,200 CPU cores
HC-series VMs are optimized for applications driven by dense computation, such as implicit finite element analysis, and computational chemistry. HC VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no hyperthreading. The Intel Xeon Platinum platform supports Intel’s rich ecosystem of software tools such as the Intel Math Kernel Library and Intel Parallel Studio XE, and features an all-cores clock speed greater than 3 GHz for most workloads.
HC VMs are interconnected by 100 Gb EDR InfiniBand, support OFED drivers and all RDMA verbs, and utilize Mellanox ConnectX-5 NICs featuring hardware acceleration for MPI collectives. On HC VMs, customers can realize MPI latencies up to 10x lower than networking options found elsewhere on the public cloud.
Optionally, HC-series VMs can connect to a Cray ClusterStor in Azure storage system for ultra high-performance storage needs.