Better Together: HPC on Microsoft Azure & Intel Technologies

Better Together: HPC on Microsoft Azure & Intel® Technologies

High-performance computing (HPC) customer challenges:

Scaling with the business Usage forecasting 1 Ever-increasing business demands 2 Unpredictable usage spikes create put pressure on HPC infrastructure inconsistent return on investment (ROI) by creating variability in demand that is challenging to forecast on-prem

Cost flexibility Cross-organization collaboration 3 Inability to obtain access to computing 4 Traditionally siloed HPC environments not with short term (expensed) costing the purview of central IT limit collaboration Customer value - HPC on Microsoft Azure & Intel:

Optimized Azure HC-series virtual machines (VMs) - Cost-effectively accommodate complex HPC workloads with Azure HC-series VMs1 - Running on Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 processors with built-in AI acceleration optimized for the most at-scale, compute-intensive workloads e.g implicit finite element analysis, molecular dynamics, and computational chemistry - Better manage unforeseen spikes in requirements with on-demand scaling of cloud-based infrastructure - Azure HC-series VMs are tailored to enable scientific and research breakthroughs in automotive, financial services, energy, life sciences, silicon, and manufacturing

Accelerate real-time artificial intelligence (AI) - Intel® Arria® 10 FPGAs within Azure architecture empower developers with the ability to customize their processing resources for mission-specific tasks, perfect for AI model training through machine learning Supercomputer-class performance - Speed time to results with Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 processors, delivering: • HPC-optimized workload performance and built-in AI acceleration • Even greater performance uplift with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512-optimized apps - Within Azure HC-series VMs, exposing: • 44 non-hyperthreaded CPU cores and 352 GB RAM • Baseclock of 2.7 GHz, all-cores Turbo speed of 3.4 GHz & single-core Turbo speed of 3.7 GHz • 700 GB local NVMe SSD, supporting up to four managed disks

Easy extension beyond on-prem - Intel® MPI Stack makes Azure a perfect fit to extend HPC environments for existing on-premises Intel MPI customers - With RDMA and InfiniBand, Intel MPI Stack enables the most demanding computational workloads to run on Azure Customer case study

Renault Sport Formula One Team Races for Success

The what: To increase its competitiveness and ascend the constructor rankings, the Renault Sport Formula One Team wanted to further improve car performance through the real-time processing and analysis of large data sets captured from car sensors.

The how: Renault Sport Formula One is accelerating its design and build process—a system involving 20,000 parts per car—with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI running on Azure and Intel. To adapt cars for each race, the team runs thousands of digital scenarios and wind tunnel simulations with Azure Batch to fine-tune modifications, pit stop tactics, tire combinations, and other strategies. The team uses Microsoft’s AI tools to find insights from the 30 to 50 billion data points it generates every race weekend. Azure Machine Learning can parse the data for anomalies and help the team as it accumulates more data every year. It is also exploring edge computing for race-day analytics, and is deploying Microsoft HoloLens to visualize simulations in 3D, which is leading to better understanding and collaboration.

The why: By resolving data anomalies with Azure Machine Learning, engineers spend less time manually checking data channels and more time on innovation—an essential tactic for trying to overcome teams with larger budgets and staff. The technology can help the team as it accumulates more data every year. The cloud’s scalable compute power enables the team to cost-effectively run big loads of virtual machines in a matter of minutes—work that previously took hours on-premise. Speed is critical and the innovation cycle brutal; with Microsoft Azure, the team can design, test, manufacture and ship parts in a few days during the race season. Read the case study

1 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-hc-series-virtual-machines-crosses-20000-cores-for-hpc-workloads/ Intel does not control or audit third-party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy. Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. Your costs and results may vary. © Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. 0121/JS/CAT/PDF 344566-001EN