Azure to offer new GPU-backed instances

Researchers can now consider more GPU computing options for the cloud with Microsoft Azure’s new instances. Using Microsoft Azure virtual machines with NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, they can scale up their computing needs to handle complex simulations faster, and trim simulation times. Microsoft Azure customers already using GPUs in the cloud are using them for applications as diverse as DNA sequencing, visual effects for movies, and modelling molecules to better understand diseases.

For traditional high performance computing, Microsoft is now offering its new Microsoft Azure NC Instances, powered by the Pascal architecture-based NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators. The new instances provide double the performance of the current generation.

With the interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and training neural networks, Microsoft is also adding new ND Instances with NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPU accelerators, which are designed to make inferences from real-world data after the system has been trained. These offer more than double the performance over the previous generations for workloads using Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit, TensorFlow, the open source machine learning toolkit, as well as other deep learning frameworks. 

With ND Instances, people can work with bigger models, thanks to the 24GB of memory on each Tesla P40, and run large-scale training and inference jobs across hundreds of GPUs.

“The power of Azure virtual machines combined with NVIDIA’s GPU accelerators enables massive scale and speed across the most performance-intensive workloads,” said Corey Sanders, Director of compute at Azure. “With NVIDIA, we are using cutting-edge technology to further our mission — helping our customers achieve more with our cloud.”

Interested?

The new Azure instances will be available in preview later in the year. Customers can sign up here.