Microsoft Azure and HPC – Ignite Innovation

The promise of big data has sparked a new age of intelligence. New levels of computation is delivering innovation and answers by people and machine alike, with algorithms and high-performance computing combining for amazing results.

We are collecting an increasing amount of data each day – so much so that nearly 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last couple of years alone. IBM confirms that we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, which can be estimated as one new Google entry every four days. The need to use, interact with, and learn from all of this stored information will continue to grow and play an increasing role in how people do business.

Big Data Meets Big Compute

While massive amounts of data are collected and stored, the users’ ability to analyze and utilize it effectively can still become a bottleneck. Many modern tools reflect a dated, batch-oriented time that depends on specialized programs and queries to extract information. With the speed and velocity of data aggregation the mechanism to derive answers is evolving and new platforms and frameworks like Hadoop and Apache Spark have arisen to eliminate the bottlenecks.

For business to derive the most value of Big Data stacks, they should be considering their Big Compute platform to power their analysis. The tradtional approach to supercomputing and HPC environment required massive amounts of project planning, investment, and resources due to individual applications and research group requirements. Another bottleneck which can reduce agility unless the resources and environment in place can readily support the data-sets and applications to power new types of machine learning or high-performance data analysis.

The traditional approach, combined with the fact that in recent years IT departments have seen a significant drop in their budgets has led to an increasing number of businesses resorting to more cost-effective ways of managing large amounts of data. Instead of using traditional super-computing, on-demand services are becoming more popular not only with businesses who are just beginning to explore HPC and high-performance data analysis as a new possibility but also for traditional super-computing centers and research groups who are facing capacity issues and are actually enabled to spin up THOUSANDS of GPU instances on-demand without having to think of planning and capacity. This capability, delivered by hyper-scale public cloud platforms like that of Microsoft Azure are truly revolutionizing how we take advantage of the data explosion.

Microsoft Azure and HPC Capabilities

Through Microsoft’s public cloud computing platform, Azure, businesses gain access to a wide range of cloud services, including analytics, computing, networking, and storage. Through Microsoft Azure, users can choose from these services to scale and develop new applications or run existing applications in the cloud. It also empowers users to cloud-enable and produce self-service batch and HPC applications; instead of setting up and managing a cluster, Microsoft Azure assists users in provisioning VMs, scheduling jobs, and handling failure. Tasks can range from multistep workflows, parallel compute via MPI, or running numerous program iterations.

Azure supports Linux RDMA technology on A8 and A9 compute instances, so users running HPC workloads on Linux can also tap into the power of this platform. The combination of Microsoft Azure and SUSE – and Enterprise Linux Server – is a platform that offers superior security and reliability for cloud computing. The versatility of this Linux platform allows it to seamlessly integrate with Azure cloud services to deliver a cloud environment that users can easily manage. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server supports nearly 11,500 certified applications on Azure’s ever-expanding network of global data centers.

Together, Azure and SUSE offer unparalleled cloud computing reliability that businesses can count on. For only the highest performing solutions that join Big Data and Compute in the cloud – get started with SUSE on Azure today. Your first step? A test-drive of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for HPC on Azure that you can complete in 15 minutes without even having to swipe a credit card.