AMD and Microsoft Azure power HPC in the Cloud

Microsoft has been a great partner of AMD, and it is evident when it used AMD’s EPYC CPUs on its Azure cloud infrastructure and provided virtual machines to a wide range of customers. Each year, AMD is progressing by a huge leap in performance, and before launching the Zen 3, AMD showed its strong HPC partnership during their MI100 GPU launch.

Azure is using 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors to power its HBv2 virtual machines (VMs) for HPC workloads. These VMs offer up to 2x the performance of first-generation HB-series virtual machines, support up to 80,000 cores for MPI jobs, and take advantage of 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors up to 45% more memory bandwidth than comparable x86 alternatives.

HBv2 VMs are used by numerous customers including The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology which used 86,400 cores to model a plant virus that previously required a leadership class supercomputer and the U.S. Navy which rapidly deploys and scales enhanced weather and ocean pattern predictions on demand. HBv2 powered by 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors also provides the bulk of the CPU compute power for the OpenAI environment Microsoft announced earlier this year.

AMD EPYC processors have also helped HBv2 reach new cloud HPC milestones, such as a new record for Cloud MPI scaling results with NAMD, Top 20 results on the Graph500, and the first 1 terabyte/sec cloud HPC parallel filesystem. Across these and other application benchmarks, HBv2 delivers 12x higher scaling than found elsewhere on the public cloud.

Adding on to its existing HBv2 HPC virtual machine powered by 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, Azure announced it would utilize next-generation AMD EPYC processors, codenamed ‘Milan,’ for future HB-series VM products for HPC.

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