Azure N-Series: General availability on December 1

We’re excited today to announce general availability of the Azure N-Series of Azure Virtual Machines as of December 1, 2016. Azure N-Series virtual machines—powered by NVIDIA GPUs—provide customers and developers around the globe access to industry-leading accelerated computing and visualization experiences via the Azure public cloud. We’re additionally excited to announce availability in East US, West Europe, and South East Asia at GA joining the current South Central US region that will be available at GA. We’ve had thousands of customers participate in the N-Series preview since we launched it back in August. We’ve received fantastic feedback, especially around the enhanced performance, and the work Microsoft and NVIDIA have done together to make this a turnkey experience for cloud adopters. During the preview, customers exercised these unique capabilities on a wide range of potential breakthrough scenarios including artificial intelligence (AI), 3D visualization and interactivity, highly computational medical research, and beyond. Azure NC virtual machines—GPU compute Azure NC-based instances are powered by NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs and provide the compute power required to accelerate the most demanding high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. Customers can now use these instances to run deep learning training jobs, HPC simulations, rendering, real-time data analytics, DNA sequencing, and many more CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)–accelerated tasks. Additionally, customers have the option to utilize RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over InfiniBand for scaling jobs across multiple instances. Using InfiniBand between instances provides close to bare-metal performance when scaling out to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of GPUs across hundreds of nodes—allowing customers to submit tightly coupled jobs like Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)–based training for natural language processing, image recognition, and object detection. City of Hope is an independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases and is currently ranked as one of “America’s Best Hospitals.” City of Hope is using HPC to bring together physical and computer sciences, and mathematics, to develop new and ground-breaking methods to model biological processes. Further, these methods are used to predict and analyze large-scale data from their high-throughput instrumentation. Using Azure NC24 instances, Dr. Vaidehi and her team are able to rapidly scale their GPU cluster footprint to study the dynamics of proteins in a few days—as opposed to a month using traditional CPU-based machines. The addition of K80 GPUs greatly accelerates the team’s research output, thereby making drug design much more efficient. Algorithmia is an open marketplace for algorithms and algorithm development, making state-of-the-art algorithms accessible and discoverable by anyone. Algorithmia is the largest marketplace for algorithms in the world, with more than 30,000 developers leveraging more than 2,500 custom algorithms. The Algorithmia Marketplace includes research contributions from MIT, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California-Berkeley, Caltech, the University of Texas at Austin, University of Tokyo, and University of Toronto, among others. “With Azure’s new on-demand GPU instances, we’re able to provide teams and organizations with access to GPU-accelerated deep learning models and algorithms,” Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia CEO, says. “The flexibility of the Azure infrastructure allows us to scale to meet our users needs.” Azure NV virtual machines—GPU visualization Azure NV-based instances are powered by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs and provide NVIDIA GRID capabilities on demand. Scientists, designers, and engineers can now utilize these new instances for running hardware-accelerated workstation applications, designing the next concept car, or creating the next blockbuster movie. These instances support applications utilizing both DirectX and OpenGL. Frame is an enterprise cloud platform that allows any Windows software to be run in the cloud and delivered to any browser. Enterprises and educational institutions use Frame to deliver graphics-intensive 2D and 3D applications as software as a service (SaaS) to any device, anywhere. Azure N-Series virtual machines enable Frame to deliver a high-end workstation class experience to users on any connected device. For example, a designer can create a 3D CAD model from a laptop using a single NV6 instance and instantly switch to an NV24;quad-GPU instance, dramatically speeding up the time it takes to run a complex simulation. Catering to some of the most demanding computer users on the planet, Frame knows that every extra ounce of performance translates to increased productivity and higher quality. The new Azure N-Series brings fast cutting edge NVIDIA GPUs, the latest CPUs, and more memory per instance than anything previously available in the cloud. And with on-demand access, users don’t have to wait for the next hardware refresh of their local workstation. They can even access this performance from their laptop or mobile device for a seamless and performant on-the-road experience. “Azure N-Series powered by NVIDIA’s cutting edge GPUs couldn’t come at a better time,” said Nikola Bozinovic, CEO, Frame. “We’re seeing an incredible interest in virtualization of workstation-class workloads. The combination of Frame and the new N-Series instances on Azure provides our customers with today’s most advanced graphics platform in the cloud.” Pricing for general availability of Azure N-Series takes effect on December 1, 2016, in supported regions in North America, Europe, and Asia. Here is the current pricing.   NC6 NC12 NC24 NC24r Cores 6 12 24 24 GPU 1 x K80 GPU 2 x K80 GPUs 4 x K80 GPUs 4 x K80 GPUs Memory 56 GB 112 GB 224 GB 224 GB Disk 380 GB SSD 680 GB SSD 1.44 TB SSD 1.44TB SSD Network Azure Network Azure Network Azure Network InfiniBand     NV6 NV12 NV24 Cores 6 12 24 GPU 1 x M60 GPU 2 x M60 GPUs 4 x M60 GPUs Memory 56 GB 112 GB 224 GB Disk 380 GB SSD 680 GB SSD 1.44 TB SSD Network Azure Network Azure Network Azure Network NVIDIA GRID Yes Yes Yes With today’s announcements, we’re taking a major step forward in our mission to make every organization and individual more productive via access to high performance and accelerated computing in the cloud. -The Azure Big Compute Team Learn more: Microsoft and OpenAI partnership announcement Azure Virtual Machines pricing page VM documentation
Quelle: Azure