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 November 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 ...
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. Make sure to enter the raffle for a chance to win a pair of Microsoft surface earbuds!
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 University
- University 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.
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 Quantum Expresso (QUANTUMESPRESSO - QUANTUMESPRESSO (quantum-espresso.org)) 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.
Announcements to know about
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.
- Azure HBv3 virtual machines for HPC, now up to 80% faster with AMD Milan-X CPUs
- Milan X Performance Blog
- Sign up for a preview
Meet our newest virtual machine series in our AI-Supercomputing lineup
On November 15th, we announced general availability of our newest virtual machines series, the NDm A100 v4-series, featuring NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs. The NDm A100 v4 series virtual machine is a new flagship addition to the Azure GPU family, designed for high-end Deep Learning training and tightly-coupled scale-up and scale-out HPC workloads. Building on our June general availability of the ND A100 v4 series, it roughly doubles the HBM2 memory and RAM, and provides a 30% increase in GPU memory bandwidth for today’s most data-intensive workloads. Read the announcement blog to learn more about the new NDm A100 v4 series virtual machines.
Microsoft achieves Top10 Ranking in TOP500
In the latest TOP500 list rankings, announced at Supercomputing 21, Microsoft Azure has joined the Top 10 club, with the highest new entry of the SC21 edition of the list at 30.05 Petaflops. Together with the original 4 clusters, now ranked at 32 – 35, that’s 5 supercomputers in the Top40. This is based on our newly announced NDm A100 80GB v4, available on demand. Read the blog to hear more about our Top 500 results.
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 more about Azure HPC + AI
- What is HPC?
- Microsoft Azure Delivers HPC Now Into the Future
- Supercomputing Performance in the Cloud
- Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud
- See where we ranked in the latest Top 500 results
Learn how customers are using Azure for HPC + AI