Microsoft Azure now supports NVIDIA GPU Cloud for AI, HPC workloads
Microsoft has added a new level of support for NVIDIA GPU projects to Azure, which may benefit those running deep-learning and other high performance computing (HPC) workloads. The pair are touting availability of pre-configured containers with GPU-accelerated software as helping data scientists, developers and researchers circumvent a number of integration and testing steps before running their HPC tasks.
Customers have a choice of 35 GPU-accelerated containers for deep learning software, HPC applications, HPC visualization tools and more, which can run on the following Microsoft Azure instance types with NVIDIA GPUs:
- NCv3 (1, 2 or 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs)
- NCv2 (1, 2 or 4 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs)
- ND (1, 2 or 4 NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs)
As NVIDIA noted, these same NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) containers work across Azure instance types, even with different types or quantities of GPUs. There's a pre-configured Azure virtual machine image with everything needed to run NGC containers in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
Microsoft also made generally available today "Azure CycleCloud," which officials described as "a tool for creating, managing, operating and optimizing HPC clusters of any scale in Azure."