Supercomputers are one of those inventions that allow humanity to constantly
make the world a little bit better, including climate research,
weather prediction modeling, universe discoveries, Mars expeditions,
pharmaceutical breakthroughs, and much more.
The NASA supercomputers help process 3d molecular geometry to search for
possible drug therapies, but more on supercomputers in just a minute.
Before we get into it,
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and it's also free to attend. Yay! The link is in the description.
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about cloud computing. All right on to the news.
The Azure ND A100 v4 cloud GPU instances powered by
NVIDIA A100 tensor core GPUs. Yeah,
I don't know much about what that means either,
but it is a supercomputer and that is something my eight year old inner
geek can understand. Using a lot of maths,
the ND A100 v4 cluster can deliver up to
16.59 teraflops of computing power,
which is that much, that much, that much?
But it does put it in the top 20 Of the most powerful supercomputers in the
world and the fastest public cloud supercomputer as well.
As the official Microsoft announcement says "it is built to take advantage of
defacto industry standard HPC and AI tools and libraries.
You can leverage ND A100 v4's GPUs and unique
interconnect capabilities without any special software or frameworks using the
same NVIDIA NCCL2 libraries that most scalable GPU-accelerated
AI and HPC workloads support out of the box." In other words,
this is an "every person's" supercomputer.
It does cost 20,000 per month though.
So don't just spin one up and forget about it.
One of the things that frustrates developers the most is
authenticating between services that are all in Azure.
Parsing auth tokens back and forth, and remembering to refresh connections,
and much more is painful.
There's already a managed-identity solution to solve this problem for many
services on Azure,
and now Function Apps can leverage identities to connect to Blobs,
Queues, Event Hubs, Service Buses, and Event Grid.
This public preview is built with the latest Azure SDK,
so they are fully up to date with new types and libraries.
The end result of all this is that you can eliminate secrets from the
configuration of your Function Apps. And that is a great thing.
Azure Digital Twins is an IoT platform that lets you create a digital
representation of real world things, places, business processes,
and people. You can model the entire setup before actually doing it.
Hence the digital twin name.
The Azure digital Digital digital [inaudible] twins.
The Azure Digital Twins Explorer is now available in preview as a web
application.
The Explorer is a visual tool that connects to your Azure Digital Twin instance,
and then shows you graphs and models.
You can modify your data directly in the Explorer too.
And if you want to check out the tool, it is free and on GitHub.
Link is in the description. Are you going to spin up your own supercomputer?
Got an interesting AI project perhaps?
Let me know in the comments and what you think and give us a thumbs up.
Also join our new Azure This Week Discord channel to discuss the trends
from this episode, interact with other students and ACG people,
and get help for your cloud journey.
You'll find a link below in the description.
As we say on the A Cloud Guru team, when you get a new boss,
but it's the same as the old boss,
so you just keep doing awesome cloud content "Seek and you shall cloud." So
see you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.