Microsoft announces Azure HBv3-series VMs for high-performance computing

Microsoft today announced the availability of Azure HBv3-series virtual machines for high-performance computing. These new VMs are based on AMD EPYC 7003-series processors and offer several performance improvements.

HBv3 VMs feature up to 120 AMD EPYC™ 7003 series CPU cores, 448 GB of RAM, and no simultaneous multi-threading. HBv3-series VMs also provide up to 340 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, up to 32 MB of L3 cache per core, up to 7 GB/s of block device SSD performance, and clock frequencies up to 3.675 GHz. All HBv3-series VMs feature NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s InfiniBand to enable 80,000 core MPI workloads.

Highlights of Azure HBv3 VMs:

• Azure’s first VMs with AMD EPYC 7003 series processors.
• Up to 19 percent higher per core performance.
• Up to 2.6 times higher per VM performance for lightly-threaded workloads.
• Up to 1.9 times higher performance for large-scale MPI workloads.
• Multiple VM sizes so customers can deploy fit-for-purpose HPC compute.
• H-series’ highest performance local SSD configuration to date, with up to 7 GB/s of read performance, 3 GB/s of write performance, and 200,000 IOPs.
• Simpler NUMA topology to increase application compatibility.

The new HBv3-series virtual machines are available in the East US, South Central US, and West Europe Azure regions. Microsoft will also bring HBv3 VMs to the West US3 and Southeast Asia regions soon.

Source: Microsoft