Recently Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure ND A100 v4 Cloud GPU instances—powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. These Virtual Machines (VMs) are targeted at customers with high performance and demanding workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads.

The public cloud vendor released the Azure ND A100 v4 Cloud GPU in public preview as a High-Performance Computing (HPC) enabled virtual machine for AI workloads. The goal is to provide a large amount of computing power to compete with other large AI supercomputers in the industry regarding raw scale and advanced technology – and these ND A100 v4 VM series are now GA.

Other public cloud providers such as AWS and Google Cloud also offer a wide selection of instance types, varying combinations of storage, CPU, memory, and networking capacity, allowing customers to scale resources to the requirements of their target workload. For instance, Google Cloud introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) family also based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU earlier in March.

According to the Azure Compute blog post by Ian Finder, senior program manager, Accelerated HPC Infrastructure benchmarking with 164 ND A100 v4 virtual machines on a pre-release public supercomputing cluster yielded a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 16.59 petaflops - a result delivered on public cloud infrastructure would fall within the Top 20 of the November 2020 Top 500 list of the fastest supercomputers globally, or top 10 in Europe, based on the region where the job was run.

#virtual machines #cloud #azure #microsoft azure #performance #ai