Cray And Microsoft Partner To Offer Supercomputer Performance Inside Azure Cloud
Cray and Microsoft have teamed up to make supercomputing performance readily available for enterprise customers. Cray and Microsoft are offering customers dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable users to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads while seamlessly connected to the Azure cloud.
Cray wrote, "Cray’s tightly coupled system architecture and Aries interconnect addresses the exponential demand for compute capability, real-time insights, and scalable performance needed by enterprises today. With this new partnership, Cray and Microsoft have made it easier for cloud customers to harness the power of supercomputing and multiply their problem-solving potential. Cray and Microsoft will also bring these advantages to a new set of customers who were previously unable to purchase or maintain an on-premise Cray system."
Cray says that the availability of it supercomputers inside Azure will allow researchers, analysts, and scientists to do things like train AI deep learning models in a fraction of the time it takes now. The supercomputer power can also be used in pharmaceutical and biotech fields to do things like genome sequencing and to reduce the time it takes to move from computation to cure. Automotive and aerospace engineering workloads for crash simulation, fluid dynamics, can be completed much faster with access to Cray supercomputers.
"Our partnership with Microsoft will introduce Cray supercomputers to a whole new class of customers that need the most advanced computing resources to expand their problem-solving capabilities, but want this new capability available to them in the cloud," said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. "Dedicated Cray supercomputers in Azure not only give customers all of the breadth of features and services from the leader in enterprise cloud, but also the advantages of running a wide array of workloads on a true supercomputer, the ability to scale applications to unprecedented levels, and the performance and capabilities previously only found in the largest on-premise supercomputing centers."
The specific Cray supercomputer systems available for Azure customers include Cray XC an Cray CS with attached Cray ClusterStor storage systems. Those systems are integrated with Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Data Lake storage, Microsoft AI platform and Azure Machine Learning services. Microsoft and Cray are also offering Cray Urika-XC analytics software along with CycleCloud for hybrid HPC management.
