Azure HX Virtual Machines for HPC
Introducing Azure HX Virtual Machines for High-Performance Computing (HPC)
Azure HX VMs: Overview
Azure HX Virtual Machines for HPC are a new series of VMs designed for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. They offer high CPU performance, large memory capacity, and fast interconnects for parallel and distributed applications. Azure HX VMs are ideal for applications that require high compute density, memory bandwidth, and storage throughput, such as big data analytics, scientific computing, and video processing.
Capabilities
Some of the capabilities of Azure HX VMs are:
- Processors are built on the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable platform (Ice Lake), offering up to 40 cores and 80 threads per socket. They also support AVX-512 instructions to boost vector operations.
- Each virtual machine is equipped with a maximum of 512 GB RAM and a local NVMe SSD storage capacity of up to 4 TB, ensuring speedy data retrieval.
- Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx adapters use RoCE v2 for fast communication between virtual machines.
- Integrated with Azure CycleCloud, simplifying the deployment and management of HPC clusters on Azure.
- Compatible with various HPC software and frameworks, such as MPI, OpenMP, CUDA, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and more.
Azure HX VM Scenarios
You can use Azure HX VMs for various HPC scenarios, such as:
- Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) involves simulating the flow of fluids and gases in complex systems, such as aircraft, cars, turbines, etc.
- Computational chemistry involves modeling the structure and behavior of molecules and materials at the atomic level, such as drug discovery, catalysis, etc.
- Computational biology involves analyzing large-scale biological data, such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) involve training and running complex neural networks and algorithms for tasks such as image recognition, natural language processing, recommendation systems, etc.
Conclusion
Azure HX VMs are a powerful and flexible solution for running HPC workloads on Azure. They provide high performance, scalability, and reliability for a wide range of applications. Currently, Azure HX VMs are offering a preview in select regions. However, these are generally available in East US region.
