(upbeat music)
- Hello.
My name is Nidhi Chappell,
and I lead the Product and Engineering team
at Azure HPC.
Today, I'm excited to talk to you
about how our customers use the power of Microsoft Azure HPC
to unlock their innovation.
High-performance computing, or HPC,
spans many verticals:
automotive, financial services, energy.
Basically, a lot of our customers
use modeling and simulations,
whether it is customers in the automotive space
that use simulation
to model all aspects of automotive engineering,
or customers in the financial services
that use risk modeling
to understand their exposure to the capital markets
as well as meet the regulatory requirements,
or customers in the energy space
that are using the latest techniques
in the upstreaming process.
Across all of these verticals,
our scientists and engineers
are always at the frontiers of science,
and they are always looking for performance
and performance at scale.
With these requirements,
we have designed a cloud offering
specifically for high-performance computing.
Unlike some of our competitors,
where you have to take your high-performance computing
and fit it to a vanilla cloud,
we actually offer purpose-built infrastructure
that is optimized for HPC workloads,
and we offer the latest and greatest CPUs
from Intel and AMD,
and the latest and greatest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD.
Our goal is to offer the latest and greatest technology
time-to-market with these vendors
so our customers can have the best performance in time.
Not only are we optimizing for compute,
but we understand that, for HPC performance,
you have to have a balanced InfiniBand network,
as well as a balanced storage infrastructure.
In fact, we are the only cloud service provider
that had 200-gigabyte HDR InfiniBand working
before any of the other OEMs had it working.
Beyond just that,
we also offer a wide range of storage requirements
to meet all sorts of customer requirements.
Our goal is to make sure
we can deliver the promise of cloud
- performance and agility -
on end-to-end flows.
We do this by making sure
that our customers can take their known and familiar tools
and be able to orchestrate their on-premises workflows
into the cloud.
Beyond just the HPC workflows,
nowadays, customers are also looking to augment HPC with AI,
to add more intelligence to modeling and simulations.
Sometimes, even to augment modeling and simulations.
This is where Microsoft in-house AI capabilities
are also being used.
As we look to deliver the next generation of HPC,
we truly believe that the world of HPC and AI
is coming together,
and we at Azure can uniquely deliver performance
intelligently, at scale.
In fact, we are the only cloud service provider
that has showcased performance at scale.
Recently, we published performance that showed 80,000 cores.
One single job, one tightly coupled job,
running across 80,000 cores, in Azure HPC.
Our customers have pushed the frontiers even further.
One of our customers in Europe
actually delivered 1 billion cell models on Azure HPC.
Beyond all of this,
we are constantly pushing what we can showcase,
and with AMD,
we actually now can deliver 45% better memory bandwidth,
than most of our on-premises customers have today.
What this means is for memory-bound applications,
they will see much better performance
and much better cost structures.
As we look to improve the performance of our infrastructure,
we have made significant investments
in making sure everyone in our value chain,
be it pre-sales, sales, product marketing,
product engineering, or even post-sales and customers, both.
Everybody in this value chain has deep HPC and AI expertise
and has worked in this space for a long time.
This unique combination
of Microsoft's investment in infrastructure,
as well as our deep expertise in the workload itself,
means we can actually uniquely deliver a product
that nobody else can.
Beyond just delivering a product,
we do believe that we need to bring the ecosystem along
for our customers to be able to realize the performance.
This is where we have been enabling
a rich HPC partner ecosystem.
We truly believe that our success
will come through our partners, not by going around them.
We've made significant investments in all the schedulers,
in OS development,
in Linux,
in MPI applications.
We actually work very closely with all the top ISVs.
In fact, Azure is the number one choice for all the ISVs,
for trying to provide a curated HPC experience in the cloud.
Beyond just the ISVs,
we also have a lot of partners that we work closely with.
Whether it's Rescale, whether it's Knack,
we want to make sure,
for our customers to have a seamless experience,
they can take their software stack that they have optimized
arduously over the last few years,
they can take that same software stack into the cloud
and have it run seamlessly.
We live in unprecedented times.
With the pandemic spreading across the world,
HPC has been rising to the challenge again.
Our scientific community has been working very hard globally
to find a cure for this,
and we've been working very closely with them.
Whether it is through the HPC Consortium
or Microsoft's own investment in health grants,
we've been working to provide HPC infrastructure
for a lot of the scientific communities,
so they can accelerate their research.
One example of that
is the research community at Duke University.
Let's listen from Dr. Amanda Randles,
how she was able to use the power of Azure HPC
in accelerating her research.
- So this all started very early on
in the entire pandemic.
You heard in the news every day
that there was a need for more ventilators.
One of our colleagues wanted to create a device
to help improve ventilator capacity,
and splitting ventilators between two patients.
To do that, we needed to run
hundreds of millions of simulations
that, in total, required almost a million compute hours.
We applied to the COVID-19 HPC Consortium,
and then they paired us with Microsoft AI for Health.
They pulled in experts, and they figured out everything
that we needed for the infrastructure,
while letting us focus on the science.
By Monday morning, we had completed 800,000 compute hours,
and finished the entire job
within one week of submitting the application.
We used the Azure CycleCloud platform
because it allowed for dynamic, resilient computing.
We were able to get 800,000 compute hours over a weekend.
It was pretty amazing to be able to submit for FDA approval
less than a week-and-a-half
after requesting the compute time.
We hope that having a device like this
will allow physicians to have a safer way
for making these difficult decisions.
- That was a really heartwarming video.
All of this is possible
because Microsoft has made significant investment
and remains very committed to HPC.
Technology in the cloud is changing rapidly.
We want the promise of cloud
- scalability, agility -
to be available to everyone.
And that is why Microsoft is making significant investments,
whether it is in IoT, in AI, in HPC, in quantum,
so that our scientific community
can actually deliver applications
that are ready for the future.
Ultimately, the developers for the HPC applications
want to use the tools that they're familiar with.
The application stacks, the schedulers,
the MPI libraries that they are familiar with.
And this is where we take the existing stack
and enable it on Azure,
so you can actually continue your development
on the tools you are familiar with.
We want our customers to be able to use the same experience,
whether it's on the edge,
in your own datacenter,
or in public cloud.
As you run your application through all of these,
we want the experience to be seamless,
and that is why we make significant investments
in all these areas.
Last, but not least, is trust.
Trust is very important,
especially in the context of public cloud.
Microsoft has made significant investments
ahead of the curve here.
We invest $1 billion every year
and have 3,500 cybersecurity engineers
constantly looking to mitigate the threats in this space.
When it comes to compliance, we are number one.
All of these investments - in Microsoft,
in Azure, in Azure HPC -
are to make sure that the promise of cloud
- performance and scalability -
can be available to all of our customers.
Thank you so much.
I hope you found this talk interesting.
Here are some more links,
in case you're interested to explore more.
Thanks, and have a good rest of your day.
(upbeat music)