I am really excited to announce that the general availability of the Azure N-Series will be December 1st, 2016. Azure N-Series virtual machines are powered by NVIDIA® GPUs and provide customers and developers access to industry-leading accelerated computing and visualization experiences. I am also excited to announce global access to the sizes, with N-series available in South Central US, East US, West Europe and South East Asia, all available on December 1st.
We’ve had thousands of customers participate in the N-Series preview since we launched it back in August. We’ve heard positive feedback on the enhanced performance and the work we have down with NVIDIA to make this a completely turnkey experience for you. During the preview, customers exercised these unique capabilities on a wide range of breakthrough scenarios—including artificial intelligence (AI), 3D visualization and interactivity, highly computational medical research, and beyond.
Azure NC virtual machines—GPU compute
Azure NC-based instances are powered by NVIDIA Tesla® K80 GPUs and provide the compute power required to accelerate the most demanding high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. Customers can now use these instances to run deep learning training jobs, HPC simulations, rendering, real-time data analytics, DNA sequencing, and many more CUDA® accelerated tasks. Additionally, customers have the option to utilize RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over InfiniBand for scaling jobs across multiple instances. InfiniBand provides close to bare-metal performance even when scaling out to 10s, 100s, or even 1,000s of GPUs across hundreds of machines. This will allow you to submit tightly coupled jobs using frameworks like the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK), Caffe, or TensorFlow, enabling training for natural language processing, image recognition, and object detection.
City of Hope is an independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases—and is currently ranked as one of “America’s Best Hospitals.” City of Hope is using HPC to bring together physical and computer sciences, and mathematics, to develop ground-breaking methods to model biological processes. Further, these methods are used to predict and analyze large-scale data from their high-throughput instrumentation. Using Azure NC24 instances, Dr. Vaidehi and her team were able to rapidly scale their GPU cluster footprint to study the dynamics of proteins in a few days as opposed to a month using traditional CPU-based machines. The addition of K80 GPUs greatly accelerated the team’s research output, making the drug design much more efficient.
Algorithmia is an open marketplace for algorithms and algorithm development, making state-of-the-art algorithms accessible and discoverable by anyone. Algorithmia is the largest marketplace for algorithms in the world, with more than 30,000 developers leveraging more than 2,500 custom algorithms. The Algorithmia Marketplace includes research contributions from MIT, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California-Berkeley, Caltech, the University of Texas at Austin, University of Tokyo, and University of Toronto, among others.
“With Azure’s new on-demand GPU instances, we’re able to provide teams and organizations with access to GPU-accelerated deep learning models and algorithms,” Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia CEO, says. “The flexibility of the Azure infrastructure allows us to scale to meet our users needs.”
Azure NV virtual machines—GPU visualization
Azure NV-based instances are powered by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs and provide NVIDIA GRID capabilities on demand. Scientists, designers, and engineers can now utilize these new instances for running hardware-accelerated workstation applications, designing the next concept car, or creating the next blockbuster movie. These instances support applications utilizing both DirectX and OpenGL.
Frame is an enterprise cloud platform that allows any Windows software to be run in the cloud and delivered to any browser. Enterprises and educational institutions use Frame to deliver graphics-intensive 2D and 3D applications as software as a service (SaaS) to any device, anywhere. Azure N-Series virtual machines enable Frame to deliver a high-end workstation class experience to users on any connected device. For example, a designer can create a 3D CAD model from a laptop using a single NV6 instance and instantly switch to an NV24 quad-GPU instance, to dramatically reduce the time it takes to run a complex simulation. Catering to some of the most demanding computer users on the planet, Frame knows that every extra ounce of performance translates to increased productivity and higher quality. The new Azure N-Series brings fast cutting edge NVIDIA GPUs, the latest CPUs, and more memory per instance than anything available in the public cloud. With on-demand access, Frame customers no longer need to wait for the next hardware refresh of their local workstation. They can immediately benefit from this performance right from their laptop or mobile device for a seamless and performant on-the-road experience.
“Azure N-Series powered by NVIDIA’s cutting edge GPUs couldn’t come at a better time,” said Nikola Bozinovic, CEO, Frame. “We’re seeing an incredible interest in virtualization of workstation-class workloads. The combination of Frame and the new N-Series instances on Azure provides our customers with today’s most advanced graphics platform in the cloud.”
Pricing for general availability of Azure N-Series takes effect on December 1, 2016, in supported regions in North America, Europe, and Asia. Here is the current pricing.
NC6 | NC12 | NC24 | NC24r | |
Cores | 6 | 12 | 24 | 24 |
GPU | 1 x K80 GPU | 2 x K80 GPUs | 4 x K80 GPUs | 4 x K80 GPUs |
Memory | 56 GB | 112 GB | 224 GB | 224 GB |
Disk | 380 GB SSD | 680 GB SSD | 1.44 TB SSD | 1.44TB SSD |
Network | Azure Network | Azure Network | Azure Network | InfiniBand & Azure Network |
NV6 | NV12 | NV24 | |
Cores | 6 | 12 | 24 |
GPU | 1 x M60 GPU | 2 x M60 GPUs | 4 x M60 GPUs |
Memory | 56 GB | 112 GB | 224 GB |
Disk | 380 GB SSD | 680 GB SSD | 1.44 TB SSD |
Network | Azure Network | Azure Network | Azure Network |
NVIDIA GRID | Yes | Yes | Yes |
I am looking forward to hearing your experiences with the power of these new SKUs. Happy scaling.
See ya around,
Corey
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