Tuesday, November 9, 2021

Azure HPC + AI at SC21

We’re excited to see you virtually at SC21, arguably one of the largest HPC conferences in the world. The conference hosts over 13,000 people each year, and provides a place for HPC researchers, experts, and practitioners to come together and discuss the groundbreaking advancements happening in the community. We look forward to another exciting Supercomputer conference and invite you to join us in the sessions below. Don’t miss the special event on December 16th where 6 Microsoft customers will discuss their move from an on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, or the micro hack taking place on November 15th.

 

This year, all Microsoft sessions will be fully virtual. Each session below will require SC registration, but the customer panel and micro hack is completely free. Use this blog as a guide to help you find relevant content quickly and don’t forget to check out our virtual booth and rollup blog to get even more insights into our presence at Supercomputing.

 

Unleash the power of HPC on Azure, a cloud built for HPC.

 

Sessions you won't want to miss

 

Technical Underpinnings of Azure HPC & AI Supercomputing

Sunday, November 14 | 2pm CST

Evan Burness, Principal Program Manager, Azure H-series VMs

This workshop provides a place for systems administrators, architects, and analysts to share best practices, discuss cutting-edge technologies, and advanced HPC systems. Microsoft’s own Evan Burness will provide an overview of Azure supercomputing architectures, their technical underpinnings and capabilities for large scale HPC and AI workloads, and how Azure distributes and supports these resources globally to support one of the largest customer bases and partner networks in the world.

 

Performance Leadership with Azure HPC+AI

Monday, November 15 | 11:00am CST

Rob Futrick, Principal Program Manager, Azure HPC Software and Services; Evan Burness, Principal PM Lead, Azure HPC Infrastructure; Sherry Wang, Senior Program Manager, Azure HPC Infrastructure; Scott Jeschonek, Principal Program Manager, Azure Storage

Hear the latest of what Azure HPC + AI has to offer from key Azure HPC Engineering leads.  This talk will cover Azure HPC + AI Software, Infrastructure, and Storage design considerations and will highlight the latest of what Azure HPC + AI has to offer.

 

Azure Supercomputing for Weather & Climate

Monday, November 15 | 1:00pm CST

Kanchan Mehrotra, Principal PM Manager, Azure Global; Huge Meiland, Sr. Program Manager, Azure Global; Brian Dobbins, Software Engineer/Program IV, UCAR

Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and simulation has long been one of the most beneficial use cases for HPC. Tune in as Kanchan Mehrotra and Hugo Meiland present on the topic of weather prediction and climate change and learn how Azure is supporting these efforts. Brian Dobbins will also discuss the ongoing work of providing researchers access to the Community Earth System Model (CESM) through the Azure cloud, enabling scalable, collaborative science in the global scientific community.

 

High Performance Computing in the Cloud comparing Azure to AWS and an on-premises Supercomputer for NAMD, OpenFLOW CFD, and Cycling Data Assimilation Workflows

Monday, November 15 | 2:00pm CST

Damian Hasak, Director of HPC Solutions – Americas, Microsoft Azure; Desiree Campbell, Director of HPC Solutions – Americas, Microsoft Azure; Dr. Steve Lawrence, Sr. Research Associate (NOAA Affiliate), CIRES

Damian Hasak and Desiree Campbell will review the advantages of bursting into the cloud for HPC workloads, from a business, performance, and cost perspective. Join this event to see a comparison of advantages of Azure VMs designed for HPC workloads against AWS and supercomputers, benchmarking showing Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics scaling on Azure, and a comparison benchmark of OpenFOAM on Azure and AWS.

 

The HPC Cloud Journey to Azure

Tuesday, November 16 | 9:00am CST

Dr. Antigoni Chrysostomou, EMEA Azure HPC Business Leader, Microsoft Azure; Alexandre Jean, EMEA HPC Specialist, Microsoft Azure; Gabriel Sallah, EMEA HPC Specialist, Microsoft Azure

Extending your existing HPC environment with cloud unlocks significant new capability and business value. This session will explore how you can start your journey embracing cloud HPC with a complementary, flexible, easy to adopt approach. Join us as Antigoni Chrysostomou, Gabriel Sallah, and Alexandre Jean discuss the various types of Azure usage, from temporary bursting scenarios to a hybrid on-prem/Azure integration up to a full transition of workloads to Azure.

 

Unlock your innovation with Azure HPC + AI

Tuesday, November 16 | 1:00pm CST

Nidhi Chappel, Head of Product Engineering, Microsoft

Join us as Nidhi Chappel, head of product and engineering at Microsoft, provides an overview of the Azure HPC + AI platform, highlights key value prop differentiation for both HPC and AI Supercomputing workloads, and discusses Microsoft’s unique approach to designed HPC for the Cloud.

 

Accelerating the Cloud with Quantum

Tuesday, November 16 | 2:00pm CST

Dr. Krysta Svore, General Manager Quantum Software and Systems Engineering

Quantum acceleration promises to help solve some of our planet’s biggest challenges—in energy, climate, agriculture, and health—and across a broad span of industrial sectors. Tune in to hear Dr. Krysta Svore share the types of problems a quantum machine will accelerate, and how you can program and develop towards these advances today with Azure Quantum. Learn how quantum ideas are being emulated to enhance classical solutions, enabling quantum impact right now. Welcome to the quantum era of computing.

 

Partner Sessions

Don’t forget miss these sessions with our partners.

 

Scientific Machine Learning Using HPC Servers on the Cloud

Monday, November 15 | 8am CST

Nidhi Chappel, Microsoft; Santi Adavani, RocketML Inc; Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Iowa State University; Aditya Balu, Iowa State University; Sergio Botelho, RocketML Inc; Chih Hsuan Yang, Iowa State University

 

InfiniBand In-Network Computing Technology and Roadmap

Tuesday, November 16 | 12:15pm CST

Gilad Shainer, NVIDIA Corporation; Dhabaleswar Panda, Ohio State University; Jithin Jose, Microsoft Azure HPC; Daniel Gruner, University of Toronto

 

High Performance, Highly Secure and Cost-Efficient HPC in the Public Cloud

Tuesday, November 16 | 10am CST

Andy Chan, Microsoft Corporation; Ravi Poddar, Pure Storage

 

 

Virtual Booth

Don’t forget to stop by our virtual booth to learn more about Azure HPC + AI. We’ll have experts wanting to chat with you, and we’ll share some links to case studies, blogs, and additional content.

 

 

Off-Hour Event

Please join us, free of charge, for a special event with Microsoft customers, where our 6 panelists will discuss their experiences in moving on an on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. Panelists represent a range of industries from research to science to visual effects.

 

1200 x 628 SC21 Community Event Promo.png

 

The event will be held on September 16th at 9am and is free to attend. Don’t forget to chat with us in our discord channel during the event.

 

  • Liberty Univ
  • Univ of Bath
  • Applied Materials
  • AstraZeneca
  • UK Met Office
  • Jellyfish

 

Micro Hack

Monday, November 15 | 9am – 11am PST

Attend our Micro hack to experience a walkthrough in creating an HPC cluster on Azure running a typical HPC workload.

 

1200 x 628 HPC MicroHack.png

 

Want to know more?

Check out this blog for more information on the environment we’ll be using in the session.

 

Interested? Sign up here

*Be sure to have a familiarity with Linux and HPC concepts to get the most out of this session.

 

 

Student Cluster Competition

Monday–Wednesday, November 15–17, 2021

For the last four years we have been a proud supporter of the Student Cluster Competition, and this year is no different. Students participate in a non-stop, 48-hour student cluster competition, where they design and build small clusters, learn scientific applications, and apply optimization techniques. This year the competition will be entirely virtual, hosted on both Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. On Azure, teams will need to run HPC benchmarks and the Cardioid application (LLNL/cardioid: Cardiac simulation toolkit. (github.com)) as well as a yet-to-be-announced Mystery Application that teams will find out about only once the competition begins. Teams will have to operate within a certain budget as a substitute to their usual power constraint at the in-person competition.

Interested in tuning in? Make sure you register for SC and check out the official page.

 

 

HBv3-series processors now powered by Milan-X processors

At the AMD Acceleration Datacenter Premier, we announced an upgrade to our HBv3 virtual machines, resulting in up to 80% higher performance. AMD’s new 3rd Gen EPYCTM processors with 3D V-cache, codenamed “Milan-X”, provide performance upgrades across a variety of memory performance-bound workloads such as CFD, explicit finite element analysis, computational geoscience, weather simulation, and silicon design RTL workflows.

 

Currently available in preview, this upgrade requires no changes to customer workloads and is provided at zero cost over existing pricing HBv3-series VMs. In addition, all HBv3-series VMs globally will soon be upgraded with Milan-X processors. Make sure to look at the following links for more information.

 

 

Digital Certification Initiative for HPC

In collaboration with NVIDIA, we now have a cloud validation initiative for HPC applications that allows customers to access deployment configuration and associated benchmarks on Azure. Check out the blog, and deploy your design and engineering applications using NVIDIA GPUs on the Azure HPC + AI platform with confidence.

 

 

Other Resources

Don’t miss out on these other resources, developed by Microsoft experts on HPC + AI.

 

Learn how customers are using Azure for HPC + AI

Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/308qk4i