Kategorie: Microsoft Azure

NBA and Microsoft team up to transform fan experiences with cloud application modernization

There’s nothing quite like watching a basketball game and cheering on your favorite team as they battle it out for points before the buzzer sounds. From the players and employees to the technology, all need to work in lockstep to deliver a truly immersive experience.

As fans, we expect personalized experiences that bring the virtual world and the real world together on and off the court. This means brand new viewing experiences and virtual reality, real-time highlights of our favorite basketball games, and seamless ways to connect with other fans (and rivals!) when we want, how we want.

Having the right technology partner and cloud-based app transformation strategy is necessary to help organizations like the National Basketball Association (NBA) continue to deliver such unforgettable experiences and exceed fan expectations. Successful app modernization requires teamwork, which is why we’re proud to share our latest customer story featuring our partnership with the NBA.

Inside the customer playbook: NBA’s IT Application Development Group

Our latest customer story takes you into the world of the NBA’s IT Application Development Group, a dedicated team responsible for developing and maintaining the NBA's applications for internal and external users. The NBA leveraged Microsoft Azure application platform services for app modernization to accelerate the time to market of apps for multiple use cases that have elevated the NBA experience wherever fans, referees, and employees engage.

This process involved consolidating the apps and data the NBA was running from multiple locations into one place, including those that were on-premises. Modernizing a large app estate requires the NBA’s IT Application Development Group to plan for many tasks, from configuration and security to provisioning and scaling, and optimizing the networking and storage needs. Utilizing cloud technologies such as Azure App Service enabled the NBA to accelerate time to market by offloading these routine but important tasks to a fully managed application platform. They further streamlined the app development process with low-code and no-code capabilities using Azure and PowerApps.

How did this translate for fans, referees, and employees? Here’s a sneak peek of the use cases that you can read in detail in our customer story:

Fans: See how the NBA used virtual simulations and digital in-game experiences, to ensure fans felt connected to the game (and one another) when gathering in person was still difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Referees (but really, fans!): Learn about REPS (Referee Engagement and Performance System), an app designed to aid referees and management in evaluation, collaboration, training, and development to ensure game consistency—and no bad calls.

Employees: Discover NBAOne, an internal mobile-first app the NBA created for its 1,800 employees consolidating no fewer than 50+ different applications into a single-sign-on experience. This simple-to-use app helped employees do everything from booking game tickets to marking time off, significantly improving their day-to-day employee experience.

Achieving a faster time to market

When it comes to delivering new experiences, we know that faster time to market is what keeps customers coming back. Azure brings not only the technology but also a number of fully managed services to support faster app and data modernization at scale:

Leverage fully managed application and data services such as Azure App Service, Azure Spring Apps, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, and Azure Cosmos DB.
Quickly deploy line of business apps with low-code application development using Power Apps and Azure.
Build on containers with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Manage continuous deployment and development workstreams with AzureDevOps.
Get unmatched technical expertise through Microsoft United Support.

As a versatile platform with global scale, built-in security, and high availability, Azure is the all-star in your playbook to accelerate time-to-market with modern apps.

Choose your modern apps transformation strategy

Every customer is a potential fan, and when it comes to choosing the right technology partner, accelerating time to market, enabling higher productivity, and global scale are factors that deliver memorable customer experiences time and time again. We’re thrilled to have the NBA partner with Azure on this important mission and love the opportunity to this customer story.

Is your organization exploring app modernization? Learn more about Application and data modernization and how Azure can help you accelerate time to market to deliver incredible experiences.
Quelle: Azure

AI and the need for purpose-built cloud infrastructure

The progress of AI has been astounding with solutions pushing the envelope by augmenting human understanding, preferences, intent, and even spoken language. AI is improving our knowledge and understanding by helping us provide faster, more insightful solutions that fuel transformation beyond our imagination. However, with this rapid growth and transformation, AI’s demand for compute power has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing Moore’s Law’s ability to keep up. With AI powering a wide array of important applications that include natural language processing, robot-powered process automation, and machine learning and deep learning, AI silicon manufacturers are finding new, innovative ways to get more out of each piece of silicon such as integration of advanced, mixed-precision capabilities, to enable AI innovators to do more with less. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and with Azure’s purpose-built AI infrastructure we intend to deliver on that promise.

Azure high-performance computing provides scalable solutions

The need for purpose-built infrastructure for AI is evident—one that can not only scale up to take advantage of multiple accelerators within a single server but also scale out to combine many servers (with multi-accelerators) distributed across a high-performance network. High-performance computing (HPC) technologies have significantly advanced multi-disciplinary science and engineering simulations—including innovations in hardware, software, and the modernization and acceleration of applications by exposing parallelism and advancements in communications to advance AI infrastructure. Scale-up AI computing infrastructure combines memory from individual graphics processing units (GPUs) into a large, shared pool to tackle larger and more complex models. When combined with the incredible vector-processing capabilities of the GPUs, high-speed memory pools have proven to be extremely effective at processing large multidimensional arrays of data to enhance insights and accelerate innovations.

With the added capability of a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect fabric, scale-out AI-first infrastructure can significantly accelerate time to solution via advanced parallel communication methods, interleaving computation and communication across a vast number of compute nodes. Azure scale-up-and scale-out AI-first infrastructure combines the attributes of both vertical and horizontal system scaling to address the most demanding AI workloads. Azure’s AI-first infrastructure delivers leadership-class price, compute, and energy-efficient performance today.

Cloud infrastructure purpose-built for AI

Microsoft Azure, in partnership with NVIDIA, delivers purpose-built AI supercomputers in the cloud to meet the most demanding real-world workloads at scale while meeting price/performance and time-to-solution requirements. And with available advanced machine learning tools, you can accelerate incorporating AI into your workloads to drive smarter simulations and accelerate intelligent decision-making.

Microsoft Azure is the only global public cloud service provider that offers purpose-built AI supercomputers with massively scalable scale-up-and-scale-out IT infrastructure comprised of NVIDIA InfiniBand interconnected NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Optional and available Azure Machine Learning tools facilitate the uptake of Azure’s AI-first infrastructure—from early development stages through enterprise-grade production deployments.

Scale-up-and-scale-out infrastructures powered by NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking rank amongst the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Microsoft Azure placed in the top 15 of the Top500 supercomputers worldwide and currently, five systems in the top 50 use Azure infrastructure with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Twelve of the top twenty ranked supercomputers in the Green500 list use NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.

Source: Top 500 The List: Top500 November 2022, Green500 November 2022.

With a total solution approach that combines the latest GPU architectures, designed for the most compute-intensive AI training and inference workloads, and optimized software to leverage the power of the GPUs, Azure is paving the way to beyond exascale AI supercomputing. And this supercomputer-class AI infrastructure is made broadly accessible to researchers and developers in organizations of any size around the world in support of Microsoft’s stated mission. Organizations that need to augment their existing on-premises HPC or AI infrastructure can take advantage of Azure’s dynamically scalable cloud infrastructure.

In fact, Microsoft Azure works closely with customers across industry segments. Their increasing need for AI technology, research, and applications is fulfilled, augmented, and/or accelerated with Azure’s AI-first infrastructure. Some of these collaborations and applications are explained below:

Retail and AI

AI-first cloud infrastructure and toolchain from Microsoft Azure featuring NVIDIA are having a significant impact in retail. With a GPU-accelerated computing platform, customers can churn through models quickly and determine the best-performing model. Benefits include:

Deliver 50x performance improvements for classical data analytics and machine learning (ML) processes at scale with AI-first cloud infrastructure.
Leveraging RAPIDS with NVIDIA GPUs, retailers can accelerate the training of their machine learning algorithms up to 20x. This means they can use larger data sets and process them faster with more accuracy, allowing them to react in real-time to shopping trends and realize inventory cost savings at scale.
Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) for large data science operations.
Increase ROI for forecasting, resulting in cost savings from reduced out-of-stock and poorly placed inventory.

With autonomous checkout, retailers can provide customers with frictionless and faster shopping experiences while increasing revenue and margins. Benefits include:

Deliver better and faster customer checkout experience and reduce queue wait time.
Increase revenue and margins.
Reduce shrinkage—the loss of inventory due to theft such as shoplifting or ticket switching at self-checkout lanes, which costs retailers $62 billion annually, according to the National Retail Federation.

In both cases, these data-driven solutions require sophisticated deep learning models—models that are much more sophisticated than those offered by machine learning alone. In turn, this level of sophistication requires AI-first infrastructure and an optimized AI toolchain.

Customer story (video): Everseen and NVIDIA create a seamless shopping experience that benefits the bottom line.

Manufacturing

In manufacturing, compared to routine-based or time-based preventative maintenance, proactive predictive maintenance can get ahead of the problem before it happens and save businesses from costly downtime. Benefits of Azure and NVIDIA cloud infrastructure purpose-built for AI include:

GPU-accelerated compute enables AI at an industrial scale, taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of sensor and operational data to optimize operations, improve time-to-insight, and reduce costs.
Process more data faster with higher accuracy, allowing faster reaction time to potential equipment failures before they even happen.
Achieve a 50 percent reduction in false positives and a 300 percent reduction in false negatives.

Traditional computer vision methods that are typically used in automated optical inspection (AOI) machines in production environments require intensive human and capital investment. Benefits of GPU-accelerated infrastructure include:

Consistent performance with guaranteed quality of service, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
GPU-accelerated compute enables AI at an industrial scale, taking advantage of unprecedented amounts of sensor and operational data to optimize operations, improve quality, time to insight, and reduce costs.
Leveraging RAPIDS with NVIDIA GPUs, manufacturers can accelerate the training of their machine-learning algorithms up to 20x.

Each of these examples require an AI-first infrastructure and toolchain to significantly reduce false positives and negatives in predictive maintenance and to account for subtle nuances in ensuring overall product quality.

Customer story (video): Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA gives BMW the computing power for automated quality control.

As we have seen, AI is everywhere, and its application is growing rapidly. The reason is simple. AI enables organizations of any size to gain greater insights and apply those insights to accelerating innovations and business results. Optimized AI-first infrastructure is critical in the development and deployment of AI applications.

Azure is the only cloud service provider that has a purpose-built, AI-optimized infrastructure comprised of Mellanox InfiniBand interconnected NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs for AI applications of any scale for organizations of any size. At Azure, we have a purpose-built AI-first infrastructure that empowers every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Come and do more with Azure!

Learn more about purpose-built infrastructure for AI

Watch the Understanding AI and AI Infrastructure webcast.
Read the An AI-First Infrastructure and Toolchain for Any Scale whitepaper.
Read the Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud whitepaper.
Learn more about Azure HPC + AI.
Keep up to date on the Azure + NVIDIA partnership and offerings. 

Quelle: Azure

Announcing new capabilities for Azure Firewall

We are happy to share several key Azure Firewall capabilities that are now generally available as well as updates on recent important releases into general availability (GA) and preview.

New GA regions in Qatar central, China East, and China North
IDPS Private IP ranges now generally available.
Single Click Upgrade/Downgrade now in preview.
Enhanced Threat Intelligence now in preview.
KeyVault with zero internet exposure now in preview.

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native firewall as a service offering that enables customers to centrally govern and log all their traffic flows using a DevOps approach. The service supports both application and network-level filtering rules and is integrated with the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed to filter known malicious IP addresses and domains. Azure Firewall is highly available with built-in auto-scaling.

New GA regions in Qatar central, China East, and China North

We are happy to announce that Azure Firewall Standard, Azure Firewall Premium, and Azure Firewall Manager are now generally available in three new regions: Qatar Central, China East, and China North.

With these three new regions, Azure Firewall is now available in 38 regions worldwide!

IDPS Private IP ranges now GA

A network intrusion detection and prevention system (IDPS) allow you to monitor network activities for malicious activity, log information about this activity, report it, and optionally attempt to block it.

In Azure Firewall Premium IDPS, Private IP address ranges are used to identify traffic direction (inbound, outbound, or internal) to allow accurate matches with IDPS signatures. By default, only ranges defined by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) RFC 1918 are considered private IP addresses. To modify your private IP addresses, you can now easily edit, remove, or add ranges as needed.

Single Click Upgrade/Downgrade (preview)

With this new capability, customers can easily upgrade their existing Firewall Standard SKU to Premium SKU as well as downgrade from Premium to Standard SKU. The process is fully automated and has zero service downtime.
In the upgrade process, users can select the policy to be attached to the upgraded Premium SKU. Either by using an existing Premium Policy or by utilizing their existing Standard Policy. Customers can utilize their existing Standard policy and let the system automatically duplicate, upgrade to Premium Policy, and attach it to the newly created Premium Firewall.

This new capability is available through the Azure portal as seen in the screenshot below, as well as via PowerShell and Terraform.

Enhanced Threat Intelligence (preview)

Threat Intelligence is information an organization uses to understand the threats that have, will, or are currently targeting the organization. This info is used to prepare, prevent, and identify cyber threats looking to take advantage of valuable resources. Azure Firewall Threat intelligence information is sourced from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence feed, which includes multiple sources including the Microsoft Cyber Security team.

Threat Intelligence-based filtering can be enabled for your firewall to alert and deny traffic from/to known malicious IP addresses and FQDNs. With the new enhancement, Azure Firewall Threat Intelligence has more granularity for filtering based on malicious URLs. This means that customers may have access to a certain domain through a specific URL in this domain will be denied by Azure Firewall if identified as malicious.

For optimal granularity, customers can utilize Threat Intelligence allow list to bypass threat intelligence validation on trusted FQDNs, IP addresses, ranges, and subnets.

In HTTPS, the URL is encrypted, thus customers can utilize Azure Firewall Premium TLS inspection to allow URL-based Threat Intelligence also for their encrypted traffic.

With Azure Firewall IDPS, Threat Intelligence, and TLS inspection, customers can improve their security posture to become better protected against future threats.

KeyVault with zero internet exposure (preview)

In Azure Firewall Premium TLS inspection, customers are required to deploy their intermediate CA certificate in Azure KeyVault. Now that Azure firewall is listed as a trusted Azure KeyVault service, customers can eliminate any internet exposure of their Azure KeyVault.

At Microsoft, we are constantly evolving Azure Firewall to meet our customers’ needs and help them strengthen their security and gain efficiencies. Last month, we announced the preview of Policy Analytics for Azure Firewall, which helps improve your security posture by providing critical insights and recommendations for optimizing firewall rules. We also recently announced the preview of Azure Firewall Basic, a new SKU of Azure Firewall designed to meet the needs of SMBs by providing enterprise-grade protection of their cloud environment at an affordable price point. We plan to share further enhancements to Azure Firewall very soon, including new troubleshooting capabilities. Please stay tuned!

Learn more

Get started with Azure Firewall.
Azure Firewall Documentation.
Azure Firewall Preview Features.
Azure Firewall Premium.
Azure network security resources.

Quelle: Azure

Empowering ISVs to build and sell with the Microsoft Cloud

Today, we are hosting our first-ever Marketplace Summit and giving every ISV and software as a service (SaaS) provider a virtual front-row seat to learn how to maximize marketplace opportunity and do more with less.

While we enter uncertain economic times, cloud budgets remain durable and SaaS retains its growth trajectory as customers look to prioritize investments. Gartner estimates $177 billion in SaaS spend by the end of the year and these numbers continue to grow. To help ISVs capitalize on this SaaS opportunity, we are excited to announce that the ISV Success program is now globally available and in public preview. This simplified path supports ISVs as they build across the Microsoft Cloud, including Azure, Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and our end-to-end security suite.

The value of Microsoft partnership

Built within the foundation of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, the ISV Success program is the simplified path forward for all ISVs. As SaaS providers look to innovate, there is tremendous value in partnership. According to IDC, Microsoft partners that build software earn $10.11 for every $1 dollar of Microsoft revenue. ISVs can start to realize profitability by not only building their solution with the Microsoft Cloud but by selling through the commercial marketplace. By embracing the marketplace as a central go-to-market strategy, ISVs can reach Microsoft customers, simplify sales, and unlock growth by attaching to a low-touch or no-touch sales channel that’s available 24/7.

Palo Alto Networks, an early adopter to the marketplace, sells its security offerings through the commercial marketplace and experienced transaction growth of more than 300 percent last year in marketplace sales—creating a persistent, always-on revenue stream.

"Leveraging the Microsoft commercial marketplace makes it easier and faster for customers to procure cybersecurity solutions from Palo Alto Networks—unlocking growth at an unprecedented rate," notes Prem Iyer, Vice President of Ecosystem Partners at Palo Alto Networks. "As customers continue to move to public cloud, we’re now able to hit every market segment from SMB to large enterprise, all through the marketplace."

Support for every ISV, at every stage

The ISV Success program is dedicated to offering support across the application growth cycle—from building on Microsoft Cloud, publishing to marketplace, and growing through go-to-market channels.

Public preview marks the consolidation of Marketplace Rewards into the ISV Success program. This creates one single, easy-to-use benefits offering that’s housed within the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program to support ISVs and SaaS providers across the application lifecycle. With Marketplace Rewards, ISVs get listing optimization, best-in-class marketing support, and additional cloud credits based on sales—the more you sell, the more you earn.

ISVs that use Marketplace Rewards see a five-times increase in sales compared to those that don’t

Additionally, we are excited to expand the offerings within the ISV Success program. For solutions with a high volume of projected Azure consumption, participants can qualify for additional cloud credits and up to 50 hours of one-to-one consultations. Holistically, the ISV Success program has a retail value of $126,000 USD for the core offering and $146,000 USD for the expanded. The expanded offering will be entering private preview soon.

Early successes

In preview, we welcomed nearly 2,000 ISVs into the ISV Success program. I recently sat down with a few participants to hear about how they are innovating with Microsoft Cloud and are getting to market quicker by listing on the marketplace.

Akouo: By tapping into the resources of the ISV Success program, Akouo’s team of 12 has moved the application from development in October of 2021 to a transaction-ready solution that will soon be listed on the commercial marketplace. With the ISV Success program, they are receiving high-touch support as it builds its solution across the entire Microsoft Cloud and they are fully committed to marketplace as its go-to commerce platform.

“From day one of deciding to be 100 percent Microsoft, we have been reassured every step along the way that we made the right choice. The ongoing accessibility and support from the ISV Success program has been a game changer for us.”—James Anderson, Chief Executive Office, Akouo Technologies

Aviatrix: Aviatrix participated in the ISV Success program and significantly accelerated and expanded the adoption of their Aviatrix Intelligence Cloud Networking solution. The ISV Success program accelerated their time to market—their listing went live in May of 2022, and by July, revenue is flowing in that requires no sales engagement. Simply having their solution available on marketplace has opened an automated and new revenue channel.

“The adoption of Aviatrix Intelligent Cloud Networking has been accelerated with the ISV Success program. With the program’s support, enterprise customers can deploy business-critical applications in the cloud through training resources and powerful tools. By going to market through the commercial marketplace, we have been able to gain access to millions of Microsoft customers across the globe and land sales directly through Azure Marketplace.”—Shahzad Ali, VP Solutions Architecture, Aviatrix

Maidenhead Bridge: Based in England, Maidenhead Bridge is a small, six-year-old company with a suite of Cloud Security Connector solutions that allow customers to connect to cloud security gateways without hassle. With the ISV Success program, they’ve tapped benefits for help with onboarding to Azure Marketplace and now boast 250 new customers worldwide, including government bodies and large enterprise pharma and finance.

“Microsoft is the only cloud provider that understands ISVs. They know in advance our challenges and struggles to create, publish, promote, and scale our products in Azure Marketplace. With the ISV Success program, Microsoft provides us with invaluable support and training.”—Adrian Larsen, Chief Executive Officer, Maidenhead Bridge

In summary, if your company can benefit from expert guidance to innovate across the Microsoft Cloud and accelerate time to market through the commercial marketplace, we encourage you to join the ISV Success program. To learn more about maximizing the marketplace opportunity, all the Marketplace Summit content will be available on demand. Topics include how to create a cloud-first go-to-market strategy, a deep dive into the marketplace roadmap, tips to land enterprise deals to unlock the Fortune 500, and more.

Learn more

Official Microsoft Blog
ISV Hub
Join ISV Success program
Get marketplace technical guidance

Quelle: Azure

How IoT, AI, and Digital Twins are helping achieve sustainability goals

Organizations striving to improve their sustainability can make progress toward those goals by using the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI technology that monitors and analyzes their use of resources and resulting emissions. However, businesses adopting IoT for other reasons often improve their sustainability as a side benefit as well.

Nearly three-fourths of IoT adopters with near-term sustainability goals view IoT solutions as “very important” for reaching those goals. The combination of sensor devices, edge and cloud computing, and AI and machine learning can provide data and analytical insights into how resources are being used, where leaks or faults are occurring and affecting consumption, and where efficiency can be improved. Additionally, Digital Twins technology can create digital models of real-world equipment, buildings, or even smart cities for more detailed insights into how they can be run more sustainably.

Our recently published e-book, “Improving sustainability and smarter resource use with IoT technology” goes further in-depth on the following insights and case studies about IoT and AI solutions and sustainability.

How digital technology can aid sustainability efforts

With greater awareness of climate change and increasing regulation around activities related to emissions and resource usage, sustainability efforts are becoming an urgent priority at many organizations. Microsoft has established transparent goals and tracking of its progress toward carbon-neutral operations and offers a software solution to help others record and report their environmental impact.

We're also using Microsoft Azure IoT platform tools, to help power solutions in the following sustainability categories:

Efficient energy production and distribution: Digital tools are being applied to help electricity production plants—a significant source of air emissions—operate as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Utilities are using IoT solutions to monitor and manage electricity transmission and distribution grids to achieve maximum efficiency, route additional power as demand fluctuates, and detect outages faster. They’re also helping to remotely control renewable energy facilities such as wind farms. Our customer smartPulse offers a solution designed to manage electricity distribution and trading to give utilities the ability to manage imbalances in a financially favorable way.
Creating smarter, carbon-neutral buildings: The construction and operation of buildings create 38 percent of total energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide around the world, creating an enormous opportunity for smart building solutions to make a notable impact on the carbon footprint of buildings. IoT technology, Digital Twins modeling, and AI have proven especially useful in managing buildings by automating lighting and climate-control systems, as well as modeling the environmental effects of any design or operational changes. Vasakronan, a global leader in sustainability, has adopted IoT and Azure Digital Twins solutions for its commercial and office properties across Sweden, leading to notable energy cost savings.
Improving public infrastructure: Updating infrastructure with IoT technology can make it more sustainable and create other livability improvements, such as increasing safety and reducing excess light pollution. The city of Valencia in Spain saw this when city officials launched a public lighting upgrade. The project included replacing lighting in a national park, where too much light can disrupt wildlife and plants. Light solution provider Schréder and Codit, a cloud integration solutions provider, teamed to upgrade more than 100,000 lighting fixtures and tie in Azure IoT technologies. The city reduced its electricity consumption, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and saving millions of euros annually.
Agriculture and food production: Data-gathering and analytical technology informs decisions that lead to better environmental practices involving planting, watering, and pesticide use. Computer Vision can detect when weeds or pests are threatening a growing area. Related technology is contributing to the development of more automation at a time when farm labor shortages are becoming more common. The N.C. State Plant Sciences Initiative, for example, is using faster and more efficient data management to tackle agriculture’s biggest challenges, with the aim of creating better predictive food analytics, increasing food safety, and making more productive crops.

Improving business performance at the same time

Beyond the benefits of reducing consumption of natural resources and reining in emissions, sustainability efforts can generate business value. Forty percent of survey respondents in a recent survey said they expect their company’s sustainability programs to generate modest or significant value in the next five years. That value primarily comes from saving energy costs, cutting back on needed materials, and improving operational efficiency.

Get started with sustainable IoT solutions

By combining sustainability goals with innovative solutions, businesses and people can limit their everyday impact on the planet’s resources. Azure IoT can help transform businesses to be more efficient, manage renewable energy production, reduce waste, or accelerate the development and launch of sustainably oriented apps. A range of end-to-end solutions from our ecosystem of partners addresses sustainability in a variety of ways as well.

Learn more from our e-book, “Improving sustainability and smarter resource use with IoT technology,” or discover how Azure IoT can help your organization adopt IoT, AI, and related technologies.

Learn more

Find out more about Microsoft Sustainability in action.
Read the IoT Signals Report.

Quelle: Azure

New Project Flash Update: Advancing Azure Virtual Machine availability monitoring

“Earlier this year, we introduced Project Flash in the Advancing Reliability blog series, to reaffirm our commitment to empowering Azure customers in monitoring virtual machine (VM) availability in a robust and comprehensive manner. Today, we’re excited to share the progress we’ve made since then in developing holistic monitoring offerings to meet customers’ distinct needs. I’ve asked Senior Technical Program Manager, Pujitha Desiraju, from the Azure Core Production Quality Engineering team to share the latest investments as part of Project Flash, to deliver the best monitoring experience for customers.”—Mark Russinovich, CTO, Azure.

Flash, as the project is internally known, is a collection of efforts across Azure Engineering, that aims to evolve Azure’s virtual machine (VM) availability monitoring ecosystem into a centralized, holistic, and intelligible solution customers can rely on to meet their specific observability needs. As part of this multi-year endeavor, we’re excited to announce the:

General availability of VM availability information in Azure Resource Graph for efficient and at-scale monitoring, convenient for detailed downtime investigations and impact assessment.
Preview of a VM availability metric in Azure Monitor for quick debugging is now publicly available, trend analysis of VM availability over time, and setting up threshold-based alerts on scenarios that impact workload performance.
Preview of VM availability status change events via Azure Event Grid for instantaneous notifications on critical changes in VM availability, to quickly trigger remediation actions to prevent end-user impact.

Our commitment remains, to maintaining data consistency and similar rigorous quality standards across all the monitoring solutions that are part of Flash, including existing solutions like Resource Health or Activity Log, so we deliver a consistent and cohesive experience to customers.

VM availability information in Azure Resource Graph for at-scale analysis

In addition to already flowing VM availability states, we recently published VM health annotations to Azure Resource Graph (ARG) for detailed failure attribution and downtime analysis, along with enabling a 14-day change tracking mechanism to trace historical changes in VM availability for quick debugging. With these new additions, we’re excited to announce the general availability of VM availability information in the HealthResources dataset in ARG! With this offering users can:

Efficiently query the latest snapshot of VM availability across all Azure subscriptions at once and at low latencies for periodic and fleetwide monitoring.
Accurately assess the impact to fleetwide business SLAs and quickly trigger decisive mitigation actions, in response to disruptions and type of failure signature.
Set up custom dashboards to supervise the comprehensive health of applications by joining VM availability information with additional resource metadata present in ARG.
Track relevant changes in VM availability across a rolling 14-day window, by using the change-tracking mechanism for conducting detailed investigations.

Getting started

Users can query ARG via PowerShell, REST API, Azure CLI, or even the Azure Portal. The following steps detail how data can be accessed from Azure Portal.

Once on the Azure Portal, navigate to Resource Graph Explorer which will look like the below image:

Figure 1: Azure Resource Graph Explorer landing page on Azure Portal.

Select the Table tab and (single) click on the HealthResources table to retrieve the latest snapshot of VM availability information (availability state and health annotations).

Figure 2: Azure Resource Graph Explorer Window depicting the latest VM availability states and VM health annotations in the HealthResources table.

There will be two  types of events populated in the HealthResources table:

 
Figure 3: Snapshot of the type of events present in the HealthResources table, as shown in Resource Graph Explorer on the Azure Portal.

microsoft.resourcehealth/availabilitystatuses

This event denotes the latest availability status of a VM, based on the health checks performed by the underlying Azure platform. Below are the availability states we currently emit for VMs:

Available: The VM is up and running as expected.
Unavailable: We’ve detected disruptions to the normal functioning of the VM and therefore applications will not run as expected.
Unknown: The platform is unable to accurately detect the health of the VM. Users can usually check back in a few minutes for an updated state.

To poll the latest VM availability state, refer to the properties field which contains the below details:

Sample

{
      "targetResourceType": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",
      "previousAvailabilityState": "Available",
"targetResourceId": "/subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<ResourceGroupName>/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/<VMName>",
      "occurredTime": "2022-10-11T11:13:59.9570000Z",
      "availabilityState": "Unavailable"
}

Property descriptions

Field

Description

Corresponding RHC field

targetResourceType

Type of resource for which health data is flowing

resourceType

targetResourceId

Resource Id

resourceId

occurredTime

Timestamp when the latest availability state is emitted by the platform

eventTimestamp

previousAvailabilityState

Previous availability state of the VM

previousHealthStatus

availabilityState

Current availability state of the VM

currentHealthStatus

Refer to this doc for a list of starter queries to further explore this data.

microsoft.resourcehealth/resourceannotations (NEWLY ADDED)

This event contextualizes any changes to VM availability, by detailing necessary failure attributes to help users investigate and mitigate the disruption as needed. See the full list of VM health annotations emitted by the platform.
These annotations can be broadly classified into three buckets:

Downtime Annotations: These annotations are emitted when the platform detects VM availability transitioning to Unavailable. (For example, during unexpected host crashes, rebootful repair operations).
Informational Annotations: These annotations are emitted during control plane activities with no impact to VM availability. (Such as VM allocation/Stop/Delete/Start). Usually, no additional customer action is required in response.
Degraded Annotations: These annotations are emitted when VM availability is detected to be at risk. (For example, when failure prediction models predict a degraded hardware component that can cause the VM to reboot at any given time). We strongly urge users to redeploy by the deadline specified in the annotation message, to avoid any unanticipated loss of data or downtime.

To poll the associated VM health annotations for a resource, if any, refer to the properties field which contains the following details:

Sample

{
     "targetResourceType": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",                                                                                                                                                                        "targetResourceId": "/subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<ResourceGroupName>/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/<VMName>",
     "annotationName": "VirtualMachineHostRebootedForRepair",
     "occurredTime": "2022-09-25T20:21:37.5280000Z",
     "category": "Unplanned",
     "summary": "We're sorry, your virtual machine isn't available because an unexpected failure on the host server. Azure has begun the auto-recovery process and is currently rebooting the host server. No  additional action is required from you at this time. The virtual machine will be back online after the reboot completes.",
     "context": "Platform Initiated",
     "reason": "Unexpected host failure"
}

Property descriptions

Field

Description

Corresponding RHC field

targetResourceType

Type of resource for which health data is flowing

resourceType

targetResourceId

Resource Id

resourceId

occurredTime

Timestamp when the latest availability state is emitted by the platform

eventTimestamp

annotationName

Name of the Annotation emitted

eventName

reason

Brief overview of the availability impact observed by the customer

title

category

Denotes whether the platform activity triggering the annotation was either planned maintenance or unplanned repair. This field is not applicable to customer/VM-initiated events.

Possible values: Planned | Unplanned | Not Applicable | Null

category

context

Denotes whether the activity triggering the annotation was due to an authorized user or process (customer-initiated), or due to the Azure platform (platform-initiated) or even activity in the guest OS that has resulted in availability impact (VM initiated).

Possible values: Platform-initiated | User-initiated | VM-initiated | Not Applicable | Null

context

summary

Statement detailing the cause for annotation emission, along with remediation steps that can be taken by users

summary

Refer to this doc for a list of starter queries to further explore this data.

Looking ahead to 2023, we have multiple enhancements planned for the annotation metadata that is surfaced in the HealthResources dataset. These enrichments will give users access to richer failure attributes to decisively prepare a response to a disruption. In parallel, we aim to extend the duration of historical lookback to a minimum of 30 days so users can comprehensively track past changes in VM availability.

VM availability metric in Azure Monitor Preview

We’re excited to share that the out-of-box VM availability metric is now available as a public preview for all users! This metric displays the trend of VM availability over time, so users can:
Set up threshold-based metric alerts on dipping VM availability to quickly trigger appropriate mitigation actions.
Correlate the VM availability metric with existing platform metrics like memory, network, or disk for deeper insights into concerning changes that impact the overall performance of workloads.
Easily interact with and chart metric data during any relevant time window on Metrics Explorer, for quick and easy debugging.
Route metrics to downstream tooling like Grafana dashboards, for constructing custom visualizations and dashboards.

Getting started

Users can either consume the metric programmatically via the Azure Monitor REST API or directly from the Azure Portal. The following  steps highlight metric consumption from the Azure Portal.

Once on the Azure Portal, navigate to the VM overview blade. The new metric will display as VM Availability (Preview), along with other platform metrics under the Monitoring tab.

Figure 4: View the newly added VM Availability Metric on the VM overview page on Azure Portal.

Select (single click) the VM availability metric chart on the overview page, to navigate to Metrics Explorer for further analysis.

Figure 5: View the newly added VM availability Metric on Metrics Explorer on Azure Portal.

Metric description:

Display Name

VM Availability (preview)

Metric Values

1 during expected behavior; corresponds to VM in Available state.

0 when VM is impacted by rebootful disruptions; corresponds to VM in Unavailable state.

NULL (shows a dotted or dashed line on charts) when the Azure service that is emitting the metric is down or is unaware of the exact status of the VM; corresponds to VM in Unknown state.

Aggregation

The default aggregation of the metric is Average, for prioritized investigations based on extent of downtime incurred.

The other aggregations available are:

Min, to immediately pinpoint to all the times where VM was unavailable.

Max, to immediately pinpoint to all the instances where VM was Available.

Refer here for more details on chart range, granularity, and data aggregation.

Data Retention

Data for the VM availability metric will be stored for 93 days to assist in trend analysis and historical lookback.

Pricing

Please refer to the Pricing breakdown, specifically in the “Metrics” and “Alert Rules” sections.

Looking ahead to 2023, we plan to include impact details (user vs platform initiated, planned vs unplanned) as dimensions to the metric, so users are well equipped to interpret dips, and set up much more targeted metric alerts. With the emission of dimensions in 2023, we also anticipate transitioning the offering to a general availability status.

Introducing instantaneous notifications on changes in VM availability via Event Grid

We’re thrilled to introduce our latest monitoring offering—the private preview of VM availability status change events in an Event Grid System Topic, which uses the low-latency technology of Azure Event Grid! Users can now subscribe to the system topic and route these events to their downstream tooling using any of the available event handlers (such as Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Event Hubs, and Storage queues). This solution uses an event-driven architecture to communicate scoped changes in VM availability to end users in less than five seconds from the disruption occurrence. This empowers users to take instantaneous mitigation actions to prevent end user impact.

As part of the private preview, we’ll emit events scoped to changes in VM availability states, with the sample schema below:

Sample

{
     "id": "4c70abbc-4aeb-4cac-b0eb-ccf06c7cd102",
     "topic": "/subscriptions/<subscriptionId>,
   "subject": "/subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<ResourceGroupName>/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/<VMName>/providers/Microsoft.ResourceHealth/AvailabilityStatuses/current",
    "data": {
        "resourceInfo": {
"id":"/subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<ResourceGroupName>/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/<VMName>/providers/Microsoft.ResourceHealth/AvailabilityStatuses/current",       
"properties": {
"targetResourceId":"/subscriptions/<subscriptionId>/resourceGroups/<ResourceGroupName>/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/<VMName>"
              "targetResourceType": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",
              "occurredTime": "2022-09-25T20:21:37.5280000Z"
"previousAvailabilityState": "Available",
      "availabilityState": "Unavailable"
           }
        },
        "apiVersion": "2020-09-01"
     },
"eventType": "Microsoft.ResourceNotifications.HealthResources.AvailabilityStatusesChanged",
   "dataVersion": "1",
     "metadataVersion": "1",
     "eventTime": "2022-09-25T20:21:37.5280000Z"
}

The properties field is fully consistent with the microsoft.resourcehealth/availabilitystatuses event in ARG. The event grid solution offers near-real-time alerting capabilities on the data present in ARG.

We’re currently releasing the preview to a small subset of users to rigorously test the solution and collect iterative feedback. This approach enables us to preview and even announce the general availability of a high quality and well-rounded offering in 2023. As we look towards the general availability of this solution, users can expect to receive events when annotations, automated RCAs are emitted by the platform.

What’s next?

We’ll be heavily focused on strengthening our monitoring platform to continuously improve the experience for customers based on ongoing feedback collected from the community (such as  aggregated VMSS health showing degraded inaccurately, VM unavailable for 15 minutes, Missing VM downtimes in Activity Log). By streamlining our internal message pipeline, we aim to not only improve data quality, but also maintain data consistency across our offerings and expand the scope of failure scenarios surfaced.

Introducing Degraded VM Availability state

In light of our upcoming efforts to centralize our monitoring architecture, we’ll be well-positioned to introduce a Degraded VM availability state for virtual machines in 2023. This state will be extremely useful in setting up targeted alerts on predicted hardware failure scenarios where there is imminent risk to VM availability. This state will also allow users to efficiently track cases of degraded hardware or software failures needing to redeploy, which today do not cause a corresponding change in VM availability. We will also aim to emit reminder annotations through the duration of the VM being marked Degraded, to prevent users from overlooking the request to redeploy.

Expand scope of failure attribution to include application freeze events

In 2023, we plan to expand our scope of failure attribution and emission to also include application freeze events that may be caused due to network agent updates, host OS updates lasting thirty seconds and freeze-causing repair operations. This will ensure users have enhanced visibility into freeze impact and will be applied across our monitoring offerings, including Resource Health and Activity Logs.

Learn More

Please stay tuned for more announcements on the Flash initiative, by tracking updates to the Advancing Reliability Series!
Quelle: Azure

Do more with less using new Azure HX and HBv4 virtual machines for HPC

This post was co-authored by Jyothi Venkatesh, Senior Product Manager, Azure HPC and Fanny Ou, Technical Program Manager, Azure HPC.

The next generation of purpose-built Azure HPC virtual machines

Today, we are excited to announce two new virtual machines (VMs) that deliver more performance, value-adding innovation, and cost-effectiveness to every Azure HPC customer. The all-new HX-series and HBv4-series VMs are coming soon to the East US region, and thereafter to the South Central US, West US3, and West Europe regions. These new VMs are optimized for a variety of HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis, frontend and backend electronic design automation (EDA), rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, AI inference, and financial risk analysis.

Innovative technologies to help HPC customers where it matters most

HX and HBv4 VMs are packed with new and innovative technologies that maximize performance and minimize total HPC spend, including:

4th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors (Preview, Q4 2022).
Upcoming AMD EPYC processors, codenamed "Genoa-X," (with general availability in 1H 2023).
800 GB/s of DDR5 memory bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD).
400 Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand, the first on the public cloud.
80 Gb/s Azure Accelerated Networking.
PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs delivering 12 GB/s (read) and 7 GB/s (write) of storage bandwidth.

Below are preliminary benchmarks from the preview of HBv4 and HX series VMs using 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors across several common HPC applications and domains. For comparison, performance information is also included from Azure’s most recent H-series (HBv3-series with Milan-X processors), as well as a 4-year-old HPC-optimized server commonly found in many on-premises datacenters (represented here by Azure HC-series with Skylake processors).

Figure 1: Performance comparison of HBv4/HX-series in Preview to HBv3-series and four-year-old server technology in an HPC-optimized configuration across diverse workloads and scientific domains.

Learn more about the performance of HBv4 and HX-series VMs with 4th Gen EPYC CPUs.

HBv4-series brings performance leaps across a diverse set of HPC workloads

Azure HBv3 VMs with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors with AMD 3D V-cache™ Technology already deliver impressive levels of HPC performance, scaling MPI workloads up to 27x higher than other clouds, surpassing many of the leading supercomputers in the world, and offering the disruptive value proposition of faster time to solution with lower total cost. Unsurprisingly, the response from customers and partners has been phenomenal. With the introduction of HBv4 series VMs, Azure is raising the bar yet again—this time across an even greater diversity of memory performance-bound, compute-bound, and massively parallel workloads.

VM Size

Physical CPU Cores

RAM (GB)

Memory Bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD) (GB/s)

L3 Cache/VM (MB)

FP64 Compute (TFLOPS)

InfiniBand RDMA Network (Gbps)

Standard_HB176rs_v4

176

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-144rs_v4

144

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-96rs_v4

96

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-48rs_v4

48

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Standard_HB176-24rs_v4

24

688

800

768 MB

6

400

Notes: 1) “r” denotes support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) and “s” denotes support for Premium SSD disks. 2) At General Availability, Azure HBv4 VMs will be upgraded to Genao-X processors featuring 3D V-cache. Updated technical specifications for HBv4 will be posted at that time.

HX-series powers next generation silicon design

In Azure, we strive to deliver the best platform for silicon design, both now and far into the future. Azure HBv3 VMs, featuring 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-cache Technology, are a significant step toward this objective, offering the highest performance and total cost effectiveness in the public cloud for small and medium memory EDA workloads. With the introduction of HX-series VMs, Azure is enhancing its differentiation with a VM purpose-built for even larger models becoming commonplace among chip designers targeting 3, 4, and 5 nanometer processes.

HX VMs will feature 3x more RAM than any prior H-series VM, up to nearly 60 GB of RAM per core, and constrained cores VM sizes to help silicon design customers maximize ROI of their per-core commercial licensing investments.

VM Size

Physical CPU Cores

RAM (GB)

Memory/Core(GB)

L3 Cache/VM (MB)

Local SSD NVMe (TB)

InfiniBand RDMA Network (Gbps)

Standard_HX176rs

176

1,408

8

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-144rs

144

1,408

10

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-96rs

96

1,408

15

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-48rs

48

1,408

29

768

3.6 TB

400

Standard_HX176-24rs

24

1,408

59

768

3.6 TB

400

Notes: 1) “r” denotes support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) and “s” denotes support for Premium SSD disks. 2) At General Availability, Azure HBv4 VMs will be upgraded to Genoa-X processors featuring 3D V-cache. Updated technical specifications for HBv4 will be posted at that time.

400 Gigabit InfiniBand for supercomputing customers

HBv4 and HX VMs are Azure’s first to leverage 400 Gigabit NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand. This newest generation of InfiniBand brings greater support for the offload of MPI collectives, enhanced congestion control, and enhanced adaptive routing capabilities. Using the new HBv4 or HX-series VMs and only a standard Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS), customers can scale CPU-based MPI workloads beyond 50,000 cores per job.

Continuous improvement for Azure HPC customers

Microsoft and AMD share a vision for a new era of high-performance computing in the cloud: one defined by constant improvements to the critical research and business workloads that matter most to our customers. Azure continues to collaborate with AMD to make this vision a reality by raising the bar on the performance, scalability, and value we deliver with every release of Azure H-series VMs.

Figure 2: Azure HPC Performance 2019 through 2022.

Learn more about the performance of HBv4 and HX-series VMs with 4th Gen EPYC CPUs.

Customer and partner momentum

"We’re pleased to see Altair® AcuSolve®’s impressive linear scale-up on the HBv3 instances, showing up to 2.5 times speedup. Performance increases 12.83 times with an 8-node (512-core) configuration on 3rd AMD EPYC™ processors, an excellent scale-up value for AcuSolve compared to the previous generation delivering superior price performance. We welcome the addition of the new Azure HBv4 and HX-series virtual machines and look forward to pairing them with Altair software to the benefit of our joint customers.”

—Dr. David Curry, Senior Vice President, CFD and EDEM

"Customers in the HPC industry continue to demand higher performance and optimizations to run their most mission-critical and data-intensive applications. 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors provide breakthrough performance for HPC in the cloud, delivering impressive time to results for customers adopting Azure HX-series and HBv4-series VMs."

—Lynn Comp, Corporate Vice President, Cloud Business, AMD

"Ansys electronics, semiconductor, fluids, and structures customers demand more throughput out of their simulation tools to overcome challenges posed by product complexity and project timelines. Microsoft's HBv3 virtual machines, featuring AMD’s 3rd Gen EPYC processors with 3D V-Cache, have been giving companies a great price/performance crossover point to support these multiphysics simulations on-demand and with very little IT overhead. We look forward to leveraging Azure’s next generation of HPC VMs featuring 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors, the HX and HBv4 series, to enable even greater simulation complexity and speed to help engineers reduce risk and meet time-to-market deadlines."

—John Lee, Vice President and General Manager, Electronics and Semiconductor, Ansys

"We’ve helped thousands of customers combine the performance and scalability of the cloud, providing ease-of-use and instance access to our powerful computational software, which speeds the delivery of innovative designs. The two new high-performance computing virtual machines powered by the AMD Genoa processor on Microsoft Azure can provide our mutual customers with optimal performance as they tackle the ever-increasing demands of compute and memory capacity for gigascale, advanced-node designs."

—Mahesh Turaga, Vice President, Cloud Business Development, Cadence

"Hexagon simulation software powers some of the most advanced engineering in the world. We’re proud to partner with Microsoft, and excited to pair our software with Azure’s new HBv4 virtual machines. During early testing in collaboration with the Azure HPC team, we have seen a generational performance speedups of 400 percent when comparing structural simulations running on HBv3 and HX-series VMs. We look forward to seeing what our joint customers will do with this remarkable combination of software and hardware to advance their research and productivity, now and tomorrow. In the first quarter of 2023, we will be benchmarking heavy industrial CFD computations, leveraging multiple HBv4 virtual machines connected through InfiniBand."

—Bruce Engelmann, CTO, Hexagon

"Microsoft Azure has once again raised the bar for HPC infrastructure platform in the cloud this time with the launch of Azure HBv4 and HX virtual machines based on AMD’s 4th gen EPYC Genoa CPUs. We are expecting a strong customer demand for HBv4 and are excited to offer it to our customers that would like to run CFD, EDA, or other types of HPC workloads in the cloud.

—Mulyanto Poort, Vice President of HPC Engineering at Rescale

"Early testing by AMD with Siemens EDA workloads showed 15 percent to 22 percent improvements in runtimes with Microsoft Azure’s new AMD-based virtual machines compared to the previous generation. Semiconductor chip designers face a range of technical challenges that make hitting release dates extremely difficult. The combined innovation of AMD, Microsoft Azure, and Siemens provides a simplified path to schedule predictability through the increased performance possible with the latest offerings."

—Craig Johnson, Vice President, Siemens, EDA Cloud Solutions

"Customer adoption of the cloud for chip development is accelerating, driven by complexity and time-to-market advantages. The close collaboration between Synopsys and Microsoft brings together EDA and optimized compute to enable customers to scale under the Synopsys FlexEDA pay-per-use model. Verification represents a significant EDA workload in today’s complex SoCs and with the release of AMD’s next-generation EPYC processor available on Microsoft Azure, customers can take advantage of the optimized cache utilization and NUMA-aware memory layout techniques to achieve up to 2x verification throughput over previous generations."

—Sandeep Mehndiratta, Vice President of Cloud at Synopsys

Learn more

Sign up to request access to the new VMs.
NEW Azure HPC + AI Tech Community Blog.
Performance and Scalability of HBv4 and HX VMs.
Learn more about Azure HPC + AI.

#AzureHPCAI
Quelle: Azure

Azure comes to Dallas for Supercomputing

Supercomputing (SC), held annually, is arguably one of the biggest annual events in high-performance computing (HPC). It’s a great chance for the community to connect and learn from one another, and for Microsoft, the goal remains the same. After a couple years of virtual-only events, we’re thrilled to be joining you in person in Dallas this year—and we’ve got some exciting things in store.

Step into our Microsoft Booth

This year we’ll be located at booth #2433—make sure to stop by and say "hi." We’ll have several goodies for you to take, a caricature artist to create a one-of-a-kind keepsake of your experience at the event, and two hardware booths to let you see in person some of the technology that powers Microsoft Azure HPC + AI virtual machines (VMs). We’ll even be showcasing our newest product launch in the hardware bar. Feeling tired? Come take a break in our lounge or café area for some much-needed relief, networking, or coffee. And of course, an event wouldn’t be the same without our Microsoft specialists and partners sharing in our booth. View our blog to see the full lineup of sessions in the booth.

Explore our joint booth with NVIDIA

We’ll also have a joint booth with NVIDIA, located at #2409. We’ll have Microsoft experts and partners giving presentations in this booth to share insights on the confluence of AI with HPC using NVIDIA accelerated computing on Azure. Don’t be shy about stopping by to talk to our subject matter experts, network with peers or simply get off your feet.

Want to take a break from the hustle of the conference and stretch your creative muscles? Come over to our chalkboard and create an image of what “Make AI Your Reality” means to you. Here’s what to do—draw your image, take a picture and post it to your favorite channel with #MakeAIYourReality, and then show it to a Microsoft or NVIDIA representative in the booth to get your raffle ticket for a chance to win an NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit—a small but powerful computer to start learning about building AI-enabled applications with ready-to-try projects and community support.

Attend the Women in HPC (WHPC) networking reception

We are tremendously honored to be sponsoring the annual Women in High-Performance Computing networking reception. Not only will this drive awareness of diversity and inclusivity topics, but will produce understandings about how we can all work towards improving the under-representation of women in supercomputing.

Visit the Student Cluster Competition

We are so excited to be supporting the SC Student Cluster Competition once again this year! Every year, both undergraduate and high school students design and build small clusters, learn scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a 48-hour challenge at the SC event to complete real-world workloads, demonstrating their HPC knowledge for conference attendees and judges.

Catch up on what’s new at this year's Supercomputing

New channels to find us

Take a look at our new blog on Microsoft Tech Community.
Check out our joint HPCWire microsite with NVIDIA.
Tour our NVIDIA on the Azure website.

Hear from our customers

With a tight timeline, UD Trucks collaborated with Microsoft and executing partner HCLTech to design and deploy a Microsoft Azure–based system for its previously on-premises simulation and design processes, completing the project in only one month. The new system’s capabilities provide better computational results and have opened new avenues of data innovation, in addition to reducing costs by about 30 percent. The project’s success has led the company to develop plans to move all of its systems to Azure. Read the story.

Rimac Technology is now running Ubercloud on Microsoft Azure to support engineering simulations during the development and testing of electrical vehicles and components. The move has allowed them to manage greater model complexity and take advantage of increased processing speed and scale. Read the full story.

University of bath moved almost all its existing supercomputing resources to the cloud with Microsoft Azure HPC + AI. To power research workloads, it deployed Azure HPC + AI resources on 21 virtual machine instances, ensuring that the right virtual machines can be spun up for any project. Read the full story.

Kensington has decreased its engine runtime from 20 hours to just 25 minutes—for 1.9 billion total calculations with every run. With the stronger insights and predictions that it gains from its optimized models and results, Kensington creates more tailored products and better serves its customers. Read the full story.

Learn more

Take a look at our new blog on Microsoft Tech Community.
Check out our joint HPCWire microsite with NVIDIA.
Azure Scales 530B Parameter GPT-3 Model with NVIDIA NeMo Megatron.
Choose the right size for your workload with NVads A10 v5 virtual machines, now generally available.
Azure empowers easy-to-use, high-performance, and hyperscale model training using DeepSpeed.
Building the highway to AI success with cloud infrastructure.

 

#AzureHPCAI #SC22 #MakeAIYourReality
Quelle: Azure