ISC 2023: Experience the power of HPC in the cloud with Microsoft Azure

The ISC High-Performance Event (ISC), formerly known as International Supercomputing Conference, is one of the most important events in the high-performance computing (HPC) industry, bringing together some of the world’s most prominent researchers, developers, vendors, and users to discuss the latest advancements in HPC technology. Microsoft Azure has had a major presence at ISC for several years now, and this year’s conference will be no exception.

Looking back at ISC 2022

At ISC 2022, we showcased the latest HPC solutions for Azure HPC, including the general availability of several new products. These solutions are designed to help organizations of all sizes take advantage of the power and flexibility of Azure for their HPC workloads.

Key themes for us in the past have been around showcasing our latest advancements in HPC and AI infrastructure, and how our solutions can help businesses accelerate their research, streamline their operations, and achieve their business goals. In addition, we demonstrated the value of our partnerships with various industry leaders and how we collectively enable customers to leverage the latest technologies in HPC and AI. We also highlighted our commitment to providing secure and scalable cloud solutions to meet the demands of the most complex workloads.

Key themes to help businesses at ISC 2023

As we look forward to the upcoming event, these key themes are even more important to discuss with customers and find ways for them to do more with less in this environment of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our experts combined with our key partners in this space are truly incredible at helping businesses optimize their cloud spend and leverage the best technology for the right ROI to get the fastest results possible.

AI is also a key theme in our current landscape, with big breakthroughs happening recently in this space, and will flow through into our presence at the event. Whether you’re working on image and speech recognition, natural language processing, or predictive modeling, a powerful infrastructure is needed to power and accelerate these workloads.

This year we’re a silver sponsor for the ISC 2023 event. We’ll have both a booth on-site (C318) and a virtual presence. We’ll have several presentations per day around key topics in the HPC and AI spaces, given by Microsoft experts and partners. We’ll also have some presentations from customers, where you can learn more about how other companies are accelerating their workloads on the cloud and ask questions.

Vendor Showdown

Antigoni Chrysostomou, Director Specialist Management, Microsoft.

Come hear about the following topics in this year’s Vendor Showdown:

• Microsoft’s strategy to continue investing in the newest CPUs and graphic processing units (GPUs) with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA—building genuine HPC and AI infrastructure at scale.
• How we are running Linux on our HPC systems and we can run message passing interface (MPI) jobs on Azure.
• How Azure is achieving world-class performance optimized often with special versions of CPUs not available on prem or with other cloud vendors on the market.
• Microsoft’s strategy around AI infrastructure for training AI models.
• Quantum Computing and the ability to run quantum use cases on today’s HPC infrastructure.
• Examples of how we help customers achieve more.

HPC Solutions Forum

Hall H, Booth K1001—Ground Floor on Tuesday, May 23, 2023, from 1:40 PM to 2:00 PM CEST.

HPC infrastructure for AI outcomes: Learning at large scale—Monday, May 22, 2023. Time to be announced.

Gabrielle DavelaarSenior AI Lead Global Black Belt, Microsoft.	Karl PodestaSenior Specialist, Microsoft Azure HPC.

Microsoft Azure claims five entries in the top 50 supercomputers in the world (November 2022). These entries are each smaller parts of larger systems, at separate sites. As a part of public cloud infrastructure, they are used by customers all over the world for running both HPC and large AI models. They are also used by Microsoft itself. Our partnerships (such as with NVIDIA and OpenAI) help us to run some of the largest AI models in the world and bring this intelligence directly into the entire suite of Microsoft products, from Windows to Office to Bing (and Azure itself, too). Come and learn some of what we have learned from training, deploying, and running the world’s largest AI models, on some of the world’s largest HPC infrastructure—and our thoughts on how this relates to sustainability and powering the future.

Want to keep an eye on what’s happening? Check out our ISC 2023 website, which we’ll continue to update as plans are solidified.

Newest advancements since ISC 2022

Azure HBv4-series and HX-series virtual machines, now in preview

In November 2022, the latest advancements in purpose-built virtual machines targeted for HPC workloads brought the HBv4-series and HX-series, powered by long awaited, newest 4th Gen EPYCTM AMD processors, codenamed ‘Genoa.’ The HBv4-series is the next generation of our long running, flagship HB-series, and brings significant improvements to key workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, frontend and backend electronic design automation (EDA), rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, AI inference, and financial risk analysis. The brand new HX-series is a significant step towards delivering the best platform for silicon design, with higher memory capacity and is designed to support ever growing models that are becoming more commonplace among chip designers.

Azure Managed Lustre, now in preview

In February 2023 we launched Azure Managed Lustre in preview, a new storage offering for Azure HPC. Lustre is an open-source parallel file system renowned for HPC and is adept at large-scale cluster computing. Azure Managed Lustre (preview) provides high-performance storage of Lustre with the control and consistency of Azure. As a result, customers can focus on their business goals, whether that’s building a fraud detection system based on statistical analysis system (SAS) analytics or decoding the human genome to create the next breakthrough in medicine.

Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines, now generally available

The new Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines became generally available in June 2022, featuring NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs and enhanced performance capabilities for graphics-intensive processing workloads. These virtual machines are ideal for graphics-intensive applications for CAD, architecture engineering and construction (AEC), gaming, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and provide customers with flexible, scalable solutions to meet their computing needs. With GPU partitioning (1/8 to 2 full GPUs available), these new virtual machines lower the barrier to entry for companies wanting to leverage GPUs, where a full GPU is not necessary. We encourage customers to explore the new capabilities of Azure NVads A10 v5 virtual machines and experience the benefits of advanced graphics processing for their business.

See what our customers have been up to

		Moody’s Analytics Moody’s Analytics collaborated with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable cloud HPC solution to support its insurance financial intelligence platform. By leveraging Azure virtual machine scale sets and Azure HPC SKUs, Moody’s was able to efficiently scale its infrastructure to support dynamic workloads, improve application performance, and reduce operational costs. As a result of this partnership, Moody’s Analytics was able to enhance its customer experience and provide more accurate, reliable, and timely financial analysis to the insurance industry.
		Climavision Climavision partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable and reliable cloud solution to support its advanced weather forecasting technology. With Azure’s AI and analytics capabilities, Climavision was able to improve its weather prediction accuracy and provide real-time, hyperlocal weather insights to its customers. By leveraging Azure’s secure and flexible cloud platform, Climavision was able to enhance its operational efficiency and achieve significant business growth.
		UD Trucks UD Trucks collaborated with Microsoft to develop an advanced HPC and AI infrastructure to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its manufacturing processes. By leveraging Azure’s HPC capabilities and machine learning algorithms, UD Trucks was able to streamline its supply chain operations and enhance its vehicle design process. With Azure’s secure and scalable cloud platform, UD Trucks was able to achieve significant cost savings and position itself for future growth in the automotive industry.
		Encina Chemicals Encina Chemicals partnered with Microsoft Azure to develop a scalable, secure, and flexible cloud solution to optimize its manufacturing processes, reduce time to solution, and increase the possibility of running larger and more sophisticated domain models that incorporate more detailed physics and more complex chemical reactions. Azure’s integrated AI and analytics capabilities enabled Encina Chemicals to automate quality control, optimize production, and reduce waste—leading to significant cost savings, increased efficiency, and better resource sustainability. Using Azure HPC allowed taking leaps in sustainability initiatives instead of slowly creeping forward with preexisting technology. The simulations generated precise, actionable data used in the design of a cutting-edge recycling facility allowing Encina Chemicals and other sustainability startups to use faster, less expensive modeling in Azure to help them deploy and scale modeling innovative ideas with confidence.

Learn more about Azure HPC and ISC 2023

Here are some key places for you to learn more about Azure HPC and our presence at the ISC High-Performance Event 2023:

• Keep up on our presence at ISC 2023.
• See what we have available for Azure high-performance computing.
• View how Microsoft, AMD, and NetApp are supporting EDA workloads.
• Learn how Azure is enabling AI workloads with AI infrastructure.
• Visit our hub for all technical content for high-performance computing.