Private preview: NVIDIA GPU Acceleration for Apache Spark™ in Azure Synapse Analytics
Published date: May 25, 2021
Azure recently announced support for NVIDIA’s T4 Tensor Core Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) which are ideal for deploying machine learning inferencing or analytical workloads in a cost-effective manner. With Apache Spark™ deployments tuned for NVIDIA GPUs, plus pre-installed libraries, Azure Synapse Analytics offers a simple way to leverage GPUs to power a variety of data processing and machine learning tasks.
With built-in support for NVIDIA’s RAPIDS acceleration, the Azure Synapse version of GPU-accelerated Spark offers gains of 2x on standard analytical benchmarks compared to running on CPUs, all without any code changes. Additionally, for machine learning workloads Azure Synapse offers Microsoft's Hummingbird out-of-box which can leverage these GPUs to offer significant acceleration on traditional ML workloads.