Friday, August 5, 2016

Microsoft Azure Previews Nvidia GPU VMs

Microsoft is getting ready to offer Azure N-Series Virtual Machines, billed as "the fastest GPUs in the public cloud," powered by NVIDIA’s GPUs. The service will enable users to run GPU-accelerated workloads and visualize them while paying on a per-minute of usage basis.

The Azure Our N-Series VMs are split into two categories: NC-Series (compute-focused GPUs) for compute intensive HPC workloads using CUDA or OpenCL and powered by Tesla K80 GPUs; and the NV-Series for visualization of desktop accelerated applications and powered by Tesla M60 GPUs.

Microsoft noted that its service, unlike other providers, will expose the GPUs through discreet device assignment (DDA) which results in close to bare-metal performance.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-n-series-preview-availability/