Microsoft Launches High-Performance Azure VMs for AI Workloads

Published: Oct 04, 2024

Cloud Computing

SHARE ARTICLE

Microsoft has officially announced the general availability of its new virtual machines for Azure customers. These VMs are specifically engineered to meet the demanding computing requirements of advanced AI workloads.

Microsoft has launched the ND H200 v5 VMs, enabling cloud customers to run AI supercomputing clusters on Azure. These VMs come with eight Nvidia H200 Tensor Core GPUs and are specifically designed to handle large datasets that require fast computation.

“The Azure ND H200 v5 series VMs deliver a 76% increase in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to 141GB and a 43% increase in HBM Bandwidth to 4.8 TB/s over the previous generation of Azure ND H100 v5 VMs. This increase in HBM bandwidth enables GPUs to access model parameters faster, helping reduce overall application latency, which is a critical metric for real-time applications such as interactive agents,” Microsoft explained.

Compared to the ND H100 v5 series, Microsoft has found that the new ND H200 v5 VMs deliver 35% higher throughput for inference workloads. Additionally, these VMs come pre-integrated with Azure Batch, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure OpenAI Service, and Azure Machine Learning.

What’s new in Azure FXv2-Series VMs

Microsoft has introduced the FXv2-series VMs in public preview for select Azure regions. These VMs feature the 5th Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8573C processor and support the NVMe interface for both local and remote disks. The FXv2-series is specifically designed for SQL Server workloads and offers enhanced computing performance, memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth capabilities.

Microsoft highlighted several improvements in the new VMs compared to the previous generation (FXv1-series). The FXv2-series VMs offer up to 1.5x CPU performance, supports up to 96 vCPUs, and provides 1.5x+ network bandwidth with speeds up to 70Gbps. It features up to 2x local storage read IOPS with a capacity of 5280 GiB, and up to 2x IOPS and 5x throughput in remote storage performance.

The new FXmsv2-series and FXmdsv2-series VMs support a range of operating system distributions, including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Enterprise Linux. These VMs are currently available in public preview across various Azure regions, and you can sign up for access on this page.

SHARE ARTICLE