SC19: Mellanox Boosts Azure HPC Cloud Instances

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that Azure is offering 200Gb HDR IB to connect their new cloud instances, increasing scalability and efficiency of HPC, AI and other compute and data intensive applications.

200Gb HDR IB connectivity enables low latencies, high data throughput, and smart In-Network Computing acceleration engines. Customers can use the standard Mellanox software drivers just as they would for a bare metal environment. And with the support of RDMA verbs, they can use all-IB based MPIs, such as Mellanox HPC-X, MVAPICH2, Platform MPI, Intel MPI and others. Customers can also leverage hardware offloads of MPI collectives to realize additional performance, as well as efficient gains for commercially licensed applications.

Third party performance testing conducted by Ohio State University, using 100Gb EDR IB connectivity, has demonstrated up to 13 times better performance than an alternative cloud offering that uses home-grown 100GbE connectivity.

“We are excited to bring our 200Gb HDR IB technology and solutions into Microsoft Azure, enabling users to leverage leading cloud services with an HPC network that offers the industry leading performance, scalability and efficiency,” sid Gilad Shainer, SVP marketing, Mellanox. “Our collaboration with Microsoft has enabled our customers to reach near native performance, and to scale to tens of thousands of compute cores. By taking advantage of IB RDMA and its MPI acceleration engines, Azure delivers higher performance compared to other cloud options based on Ethernet. We look forward to continuing work with Microsoft to introduce future gens and capabilities.“

Girish Bablani, corporate VP, Azure compute, Microsoft, said: “Microsoft Azure is designed to bring leading performance and scalability to customers seeking to run compute and data intensive applications in the cloud. We also strive to ensure our customers can use the same software drivers and libraries running on their on-premises HPCs. By leveraging 200Gb HDR IB, we are able to offer scale and performance that rivals the fastest bare-metal HPCs for real-world HPC and AI workloads.“