Cray Supercomputers Are more Closer To You With Microsoft Azure

Microsoft and Cray announced availability of Cray supercomputer in Microsoft Azure at no charge to qualified customers. The Cray supercomputing evironment in Microsoft Azure cloud platform's data center will help customers to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at unprecedented scale.

Cray has parterned With Microsoft and Intel to offer Sentinel, a Cray XC50 system in Azure. Cray experts will work and help customers leveraging Azure’s rich portfolio of cloud services and solutions to run their production workloads on Sentinel. Large-scale simulation and modeling workloads in the cloud now possible with Cray's Sentinel supercomputers. Azure cloud platform ensures on-demand access to uncompromising performance at scale.


Sential Cray XC50 system bundles,

• Peak system performance of 500 PF and 1 PF in a single cabinet,
• CPU and GPU processors — Cavium ThunderX2 processors, NVIDIA Tesla P100 PCIe GPUs and Intel Xeon Scalable processor
• 2,000 cores 
• Attached Cray ClusterStor parallel file-system storage,
• The Cray Linux Environment,
• The Cray-developed Aries network interconnect,
• The Cray Programming Environment that includes optimized compilers, libraries and tools

Executive Opinion

Senior vice president and CMO at Cray, Fred Kohout, said, “Cray, Intel and Microsoft are joining forces to build this first-of-its-kind supercomputing service in the public cloud. Sentinel, powered by Intel processors, delivers uncompromising performance at scale. Customers can now build sophisticated end-to-end workflows in Microsoft Azure that run modeling and simulation at scale on a Cray supercomputer. With Cray in Azure, customers have the choice of Intel processors, Intel or Cray compilers, and technologies optimized for their supercomputing workloads. They can also generate data on the parallel file system and integrate this data with other Azure services.”

Brett Tanzer, general manager, Microsoft Corp. said, “The availability of Cray supercomputing services to our common customers is a huge step forward for any organization pushing the boundaries of research, simulation, and artificial intelligence in the cloud, enabling them to achieve and accelerate unprecedented advances in engineering, health, science and other applications.”

Vice president and general manager, Intel’s Data Center Group, Trish Damkroger, said, “The convergence of HPC and AI is driving a paradigm shift in computing and analytics. Access to optimized HPC capabilities in the cloud will enable users to take advantage of the scalability and agility benefits of public cloud and provide a platform for developers to test new classes of HPC-AI algorithms. Our partnership with Cray and Microsoft accelerates innovation and discovery on the Cray supercomputers powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors, while benefiting from the Microsoft Azure cloud offering.”

According to the announcement, with a dedicated Cray supercomputer in Azure, customers can get the same scalability in the cloud as they get with an on-premises Cray supercomputer. Cray in Azure addresses demands for capability computing for customers experiencing time-to-solution or scalability limitations in the cloud. With a Cray supercomputer in Azure, customers will be able to confidently and affordably scale any workload virtually.