Zooming in on HPC
High-performance computing (HPC) is a pure infrastructure topic, because it boils down to bringing an unusual amount of compute and memory to a given workload. In general, HPC jobs are handled by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of machines in parallel. Figure 3.17 shows most of the current Azure HPC landscape:
Figure 3.17 – Zoom-in on HPC
For memory-driven workloads, such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), you may rely on HB-series virtual machines, which are bandwidth-optimized. For FLOPS-driven (short for floating-point operations per second) workloads, which require a fast and optimized CPU, you can rely on the HC series. If you are unsure of whether your workload is memory- or flops-driven, you might rely on Azure Cray, a supercomputer delivered as a managed service. When it comes to job scheduling and underlying infrastructure management, you can count on Azure Batch and Azure Cycle Cloud. Azure Batch is a fully managed...
