This is one of the most exciting posts I’ve written in my 15+ years of existence in the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry.

AMD EPYC Zen 3 “Milan” is integrated, tested and available on the HPCBOX platform on Microsoft Azure, on LAUNCH DAY!

This is something which seldom happens in the HPC world, very few users ever get to start production on day one of the release of a new and very impressive processor generation upgrade.

I will not be doing any technical comparison between Zen 3 and Zen 2 and neither will I present any specific application benchmark numbers in this post. I am sure there’ll be many posts by AMD, Microsoft and other ISVs who’ll be publicly sharing information on the performance boost they see for their codes with EPYC Zen 3 “Milan”. This post will be more about HPCBOX and how we could deliver this upgrade experience for our users, on launch day and without having to set our hands on the physical hardware or physically be present in a datacenter(s) (actually multiple regions)! Awesome work and support from the Azure team!
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Drizti was a launch partner for the new HBv3 instance size on Microsoft Azure and these instances are powered by the new EPYC 7xx3/Milan CPUs, HDR InfiniBand and sport very impressive dual NVMe drives which give a big performance boost to applications which use local scratch, specifically when they are striped.

​Read more about HBv3 here

It all started with Drizti getting access to 1000+ cores of HBv3 instances for functional and compatibility testing, to make sure we are ready for GA availability of HBv3 on launch day of AMD EPYC ”Milan” CPUs. We went through testing, adding necessary support within the HPCBOX platform to make sure we are able to use the cool new features available on the instances, like automate striping of NVMe, testing out MPI compatibility, testing the workflow component of HPCBOX, auto-scaling/shutdown/start etc. and all other functions which are offered by the HPCBOX platform. In addition to this, we also did some performance tests with different ISV and open-source codes, mainly to make sure the HPCBOX workflow engine can correctly handle the new instances and automatically optimize application pipelines to take advantage of the new hardware.

Some of the applications we tested were ANSYS CFX, ANSYS Fluent, OpenFOAM. At a high level, we can share that we are seeing impressive performance benefits of using EPYC “Milan”, particularly for large runs. Also, for applications which are local scratch bound, we expect users to get a good boost due to the possibility of having striped NVMes in HBv3.
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We also did a test to see how easy it would be to upgrade HPC for our users and were really impressed that we could just switch our users from HBv2 to HBv3, meaning from “Rome” to “Milan” and to upgraded local scratch in under 30 minutes! This is mainly because of the design of the HPCBOX platform, it is a self-contained platform, and this gives us the ability to fine tune platform capabilities quickly without depending on external services to get upgraded first.
 Agile and Impressive!

Drizti is very thankful to Microsoft for having given us this opportunity of being a launch partner for the new HBv3 series and for supporting us in making sure we are ready for HBv3 in HPCBOX on launch day. 

We are looking forward to getting some of our users try out their models on the new instances and help them get a significant boost in productivity with the new hardware.
Please contact us here to learn how you can accelerate innovation with HPCBOX on Azure and how we can help you with Personal Supercomputing, keeping you on the latest and greatest HPC technologies, on launch day, tested and certified for use! You don’t need your own data center or even an in-house HPC team to get benefits of supercomputers in your product development.
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All you need to do is get in touch with us!

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Author
Dev S.
Founder and CTO, Drizti Inc

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OpenFOAM
OpenFOAM is free, open source software for CFD from the OpenFOAM Foundation.

Unique Capabilities
HPCBOX cluster for OpenFOAM has both v5 and v6 of OpenFOAM pre-installed and integrated to run in distributed parallel mode over a high speed Infiniband fabric on Microsoft Azure. Users can create and execute their simulation workflows with the rich desktop experience provided by HPCBOX, the same way they would do on their personal computers. Some of the unique capabilities offered by HPCBOX are:

Fine-grained control over HPC resources
HPCBOX provides real elasticity to HPC environments on the cloud, resources can be added, removed, shutdown and started on-demand or as part of the simulation pipeline.

Remote 3D
Visualization is an important aspect of simulation engineering. HPCBOX delivers hardware accelerated remote 3D, allowing users to perform their post processing activities directly on the HPC cluster in the cloud. This is made possible with the use of Azure’s NVIDIA equipped GPU nodes for visualization and HPCBOX’s hardware accelerated remote graphics capability.

Secure
All access to the cluster, including file transfers is over a secure channel giving users the best possible industry standard protection for their HPC activities.

Rich Desktop Experience
​HPCBOX delivers a rich desktop experience avoiding the use of complicated web forms and command line tools for simulation management and execution. This lets users maximize their use of HPC resources and gives them much more freedom in how they work with simulation engineering and virtual prototyping.

Learn More
To learn more about HPCBOX and its capabilities, visit HPCBOX
Feel free to contact Drizti for more information on how to accelerate your product development with HPCBOX.

All third-party product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks 
of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation or endorsement by them.