- Hi everyone, I'm Gauhar Junnarkar
and I'm a Program Manager
at Microsoft HPC and AI product team.
Today, I will be showcasing our framework
for onboarding onto the Azure HPC and AI platform.
At Azure, we seek partners from different industries
with interesting use cases, to showcase their software
on our platform in the best possible light.
With this in mind, we have embarked on a program
to onboard partners on our platform,
which makes it very easy for partners
to get the benefits of the Azure Cloud
with minimal effort.
At the end of my talk, I will be joined by Mike Pautz,
who's a Director in Cloud Analytics from Altair,
who will discuss the program
and how this has worked for Altair.
As more and more customers onboard onto Azure,
they often seek validation.
Specifically, customers want to know,
which applications will run on Azure HPC AI?
What are the expected costs?
And what kind of results should they expect to see?
With this in mind, we created a Go To Market program
for our partners, it really answers three questions.
What is the best configuration for this workload on Azure?
What is the expected performance?
How to set it up and the approximate Azure costs
for running the benchmark models?
In conjunction with our testing partner, Capgemini,
we embarked on a program to acquire test licenses
for applications, and work with software vendors
on the timeline, the scope, and the effort.
We've created quite simply a Digital Certification Factory.
We install the licenses, we run the benchmarks,
and we procure the results.
The process has been designed to be largely hands-free
for a software vendor who wishes to onboard
onto the Azure HPC and AI platform.
So what does this mean for partners?
A partner provides to us a software license
executable file, relevant benchmarks and KPIs
for the target industry, a data set for doing this,
and then be available for technical Q & A
for tweaks and optimization.
In conjunction with our partner Capgemini,
we produce attested performance results,
a curated recipe guide developed in close consultation
with the software vendor, and once published,
Microsoft will support marketing
and all co-sales activities
for the relevant partner on Azure.
Here is an overview of the recipe document we have produced,
as you can see, it's pretty detailed.
We show a high level architecture,
additionally, we produce graphs, which showcase
the awesome performance a customer might see,
and also the associated high level Azure costs.
So finally, to summarize this program,
this is a collaborative approach
wherein Microsoft, Capgemini, and the software vendor
work hand in hand, and our goal is to showcase
your software in the best possible light.
Nothing will be shared without the explicit permission
of the software vendor.
We really want to produce a win-win scenario,
we work jointly to produce a great customer experience,
we support software vendors
with introductions to Microsoft customers,
and finally, we've tried to make this
as easy as possible for our software partners.
All of this material is hosted
on this dedicated GitHub page.
This contains all the artifacts to the program,
and I can show you various parts of the webpage.
As a software vendor on Azure,
we will feature your logo prominently
and all the applications that you are
supporting on the Azure platform.
Over and above, we have a link
which will provide an overview
of the Azure HPC and AI platform.
And finally, we have invested in a Microsoft learn module,
which will provide you a good understanding
on how to run your workload on Azure.
Now I'd like to bring in Mike
to learn about Altair's experience on onboarding
onto the HPC and AI platform.
Hi Mike, thanks for joining our call today,
I really appreciate your time.
I'd like to first start off by just introducing you
and your company to our audience.
What does Altair do and what do customers use
their products and services for?
- Sure, sure, thanks for having me today Gauhar,
it's great to talk to you and I'm excited,
I'm excited to dig into this a little bit.
Yeah, so yeah, Altair as a company's been around
since 1985, we're a global leader
in computational science and intelligence
that provides software and cloud solutions
for simulation, high performance computing,
data analytics, and artificial intelligence.
We basically enable organizations
across all industries to compete more effectively,
drive smarter decisions,
and really create optimized
and faster time to market
for companies that want to bring,
develop, and test products.
We've actually been helping companies
for over 30 years in this regard.
- And most of your companies are, most of the customers
you serve are in the manufacturing sector
and broadly the product development sector?
- Yeah, so, now that we have a portfolio of tools
that include data analytics,
we have HPC enablement along with our
legacy simulation and design,
we actually are across most vertical,
so you can think about automotive,
you can think about aerospace, you can think about energy,
you can think about telecommunications,
banking and finance, really across the gambit.
- That's great, that's great.
So how is Altair participating
in the Azure HPC validation program?
- Yeah, so this is a great program,
we appreciate participating, we're working closely
with Microsoft really to run our solvers,
so these are high compute intensive applications
that do a lot of analysis and
looking at how do we solve problems faster for companies?
So if you think about like aerodynamics
and how do you make a vehicle more efficient,
and look looking at
discrete element modeling,
and how do pharmaceutical companies make
drugs that are gonna be more impactful?
Our solvers solve those types of problems.
- So what's your experience been like?
How did it go?
- Yeah, so, working with the team at Microsoft
has been very good,
we have good expertise on the Microsoft side
to ensure that we're looking at the right infrastructure,
it's been helpful for our team to provide guidance
on which machine types the solvers are gonna be
most effective on, and really kind of bringing up
the level of understanding across both organizations,
and so what I think that translates to
is a better recipe for customers,
so when they're looking at migrating workloads,
Altair workloads to Azure, they have very good guidance
and they're able to do that more easily,
faster, with better results.
- That's great, Mike, can you break it down,
like what was the sort of, how did this work,
how did it all come about step by step
if it's possible for you to go into details?
- Yeah, so working with you and the team
we kind of recognize this as an opportunity
to kind of provide a baseline
of instructions for customers to look at,
what solver workloads are they running,
if they need that additional compute
that the Azure infrastructure provides,
they know which machine types they're going to be able to
be most effective on and most cost efficient as well.
And so in working with the team,
they've created a good instruction set,
we're looking across multiple machine types
and what the performance is, both from a
time standpoint, but also from a cost efficacy.
And it's been iterative, the process has been iterative,
but there's learning on both sides,
and I think that we're really
improving as we go along, and I think
that this program is going to be very helpful
for customers and I'd like to see it continue to evolve.
- That's great, can you talk more about
the benefits that Altair has received
through this program?
- Yeah, so I think that it's useful for us to have
kind of a neutral party to validate the solvers.
Many times we're into it
because we are building the products,
and so it's good to have Microsoft
come in and provide an objective viewpoint.
We're running it on across the infrastructure
as far as I understand, and so it's good to understand
which machine types are gonna be more performant
and more optimized for kind of
the various customer use cases.
But I also think there's good benefit
for the Microsoft team to learn more
about the Altair solvers themselves,
the use cases, and also get the guidance
from the experts at Altair.
- That's great, any suggestions for improvement Mike,
we are all open in terms of how we can better this program
or if there's anything we can do from our side?
- Yeah, I think we have a really good start.
I think there, as I mentioned earlier,
there's learning on both sides,
and as the infrastructure, the Azure infrastructure,
continues to evolve and our product capabilities
continue to evolve, I'd like to see us
continue down this path, because I think that
in the end not only do Microsoft and Altair benefit,
but our mutual customers do as well,
so thank you for running the program,
and yeah, we look forward to continuing
to make it better and improve it.
- Great, that's awesome to hear.
Thank you so much for your time, Mike,
I really appreciate you jumping onto this call
and giving us your insights,
this has been an eye opening experience, thank you.
- Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [Gauhar] Well, that does it for me folks,
it's been a pleasure talking to all of you.
Click on the resource links attached here
to learn more and have yourselves
a fantastic rest of the day.