The A8-A11 and H-series sizes are also known as compute-intensive instances. The hardware that runs these sizes is designed and optimized for compute-intensive and network-intensive applications, including high-performance computing (HPC) cluster applications, modeling, and simulations. The A8-A11 series uses Intel Xeon E5-2670 @ 2.6 GHZ and the H-series uses Intel Xeon E5-2667 v3 @ 3.2 GHz.
Azure H-series virtual machines are the next generation high performance computing VMs aimed at high end computational needs, like molecular modeling, and computational fluid dynamics. These 8 and 16 core VMs are built on the Intel Haswell E5-2667 V3 processor technology featuring DDR4 memory and local SSD based storage. +
In addition to the substantial CPU power, the H-series offers diverse options for low latency RDMA networking using FDR InfiniBand and several memory configurations to support memory intensive computational requirements.
Size table definitions
- Storage capacity is shown in units of GiB or 1024^3 bytes. When comparing disks measured in GB (1000^3 bytes) to disks measured in GiB (1024^3) remember that capacity numbers given in GiB may appear smaller. For example, 1023 GiB = 1098.4 GB
- Disk throughput is measured in input/output operations per second (IOPS) and MBps where MBps = 10^6 bytes/sec.
- Data disks can operate in cached or uncached modes. For cached data disk operation, the host cache mode is set to ReadOnly or ReadWrite. For uncached data disk operation, the host cache mode is set to None.
RDMA-capable instances
A subset of the compute-intensive instances (H16r, H16mr, A8, and A9) feature a network interface for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) connectivity. This interface is in addition to the standard Azure network interface available to other VM sizes. +
This interface allows the RDMA-capable instances to communicate over an InfiniBand network, operating at FDR rates for H16r and H16mr virtual machines, and QDR rates for A8 and A9 virtual machines. These RDMA capabilities can boost the scalability and performance of Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications.+
Following are requirements for RDMA-capable Windows VMs to access the Azure RDMA network: