Cray supercomputers coming to Microsoft Azure

Microsoft teams up with Cray to cater for enterprise high-performance computing demands on Azure

American tech giant microsoft is bringing Cray supercomputers to the Azure cloud platform in a bid to cater for high performance computing users.

The two companies have formed an alliance to cater for enterprises that need access to high performance, distributed working environments to keep ahead of the curve, but which don't have either the desire of the funds to buy a supercomputer outright.

They're also looking to broaden the availability of supercomputing, bringing it to new markets and customers. Dedicated Cray systems will be integrated into Microsoft Azure datacentres.

According to the firms, this will give customers the ability to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at high volumes - enabled by Azure Cloud.

Cray has developed a range of machines that make use of Intel Xeon processors, Xeon Phi and Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs coprocessors while using interconnects like InfiniBand. The latter happens to be used in Azure, too.

The company's supercomputers address the growing demand by large enterprises for high-performance compute capability, real-time insights and scalable performance.

With Cray and Azure integration, researchers, analysts, scientists and other specialists will have the ability to generate AI deep learning models for fields such as medical imaging and autonomous vehicles in a fraction of the time.

Cray gave the example of pharmaceutical and biotech scientists, who can tap into this partnership to perform whole genome sequencing and shorten computation to cure.

As well as this, automotive and aerospace product engineers are able to carry out crash simulation, computational fluid dynamic simulations and build digital twins.

Meanwhile, geophysicists are able to accelerate they way they conduct oil field analysis and reduce exploration risk thanks to seismic imaging fidelity and faster reservoir characterization.

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, said: "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,

"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 Cray and Microsoft partnership is expanding the accessibility of Cray supercomputers and gives customers the cloud-based supercomputing capabilities they need to increase their competitive advantage."

Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, said: "Using the enterprise-proven power of Microsoft Azure, customers are running their most strategic workloads in our cloud.

"By working with Cray to provide dedicated supercomputers in Azure, we are offering customers uncompromising performance and scalability that enables a host of new previously unimaginable scenarios in the public cloud.

"More importantly, we're moving customers into a new era by empowering them to use HPC and AI to drive breakthrough advances in science, engineering and health."