Last year we introduced our first GPU offering powered by NVIDIA’s Tesla-based Gpus and we have seen an amazing customer response within UK education with Universities all across the country using GPUs within teaching, learning and Research.

These machines offer up to four Tesla K80 GPUs in a single virtual machine. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/series/#n-series

One of the key advantages cited by many academics is that these series offers RDMA and InfiniBand connectivity for extremely low-latency, high throughput, and scale-out Workloads. We want to enable your workloads to scale-up and to scale-out with Azure ExpressRoute connections to many UK University Campuses this has allowed academics and students to scale out from existing on premise GPU clusters to Azure.

For academic year 2017/2018 we be expanding our GPU-based offerings on Azure with the new ND-series.

This new series, powered by NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs based on the new Pascal Architecture, is excellent for training and inference. These instances provide over 2x the performance over the previous generation for FP32 (single precision floating point operations), for AI workloads utilizing CNTK, TensorFlow, Caffe, and other frameworks.

The ND-series also offers a much larger GPU memory size (24GB), enabling customers to fit much larger neural net models. Finally, like our NC-series, the ND-series will offer RDMA and InfiniBand connectivity so you can run large-scale training jobs spanning hundreds of GPUs.

Azure ND Series

Here is a table describing these new sizes:

Upgrading and enhancement to NC Series

The next generation of our NC-series, the NCv2, powered by NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. These new GPUs provide more than 2x the computational performance of our current NC-series. We will also offer InfiniBand networking for workloads that require fast interconnect, like Oil & Gas, Automotive, and Genomics to also accelerate scale out capability as well as improved single instance performance.

“With these new offerings, Microsoft is bringing the benefits of the Pascal architecture to thousands of enterprises eager to transform their businesses with the power of deep learning and high performance computing,” said Ian Buck, General Manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “The demand for accelerated computing with GPUs has never been higher, and we are thrilled to be working with Microsoft to provide the leading edge computing platform for Azure.

Sign up for the P100 Azure Preview

The above new sizes will be available later in the year. To sign up for the preview, please visit the sign-up page.

For more details on availability see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/more-gpus-more-power-more-intelligence