Microsoft Azure Adds A100 GPU Instances for 'Supercomputer-Class AI' in the Cloud

Microsoft Azure continues to infuse its cloud platform with HPC- and AI-directed technologies. Today the cloud services purveyor announced a new virtual machine family aimed at "supercomputer-class AI," backed by Nvidia A100 Ampere GPUs, AMD Eypc Rome CPUs, 1.6 Tbps HDR InfiniBand, and PCIe 4.0 connectivity. The NDv4 VM instances are scalable to more than 100 billion parameters and exaops of compute, according to Evan Burness, principal program manager for HPC & Big Compute at Azure. "In our continuum of Azure innovation, we're excited to announce the new ND A100 v4 VM series, our most powerful and massively scalable AI VM, available on-demand from eight, to thousands of interconnected Nvidia GPUs across hundreds of VMs," said Ian Finder, senior program manager, accelerated HPC infrastructure at Azure. Before building these instances into its Azure cloud service, Microsoft first designed and deployed an AI supercomputer for OpenAI out of similar elements: Nvidia GPUs and AMD Eypc Rome chips.