April 24, 2019 — In a blog post, Cray is highlighting three new Cray in Azure offers. The blog post is included below.

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Researchers have been making amazing discoveries with Cray technology for decades. And we want to continue helping those visionaries extend the boundaries of what’s possible for all of us. It’s why we’re partnering exclusively with Microsoft to provide unprecedented access to supercomputing capabilities in Azure.

Cray in Azure offers a no-compromise solution for customers who need large-scale computing performance and still want to leverage the cloud economics and augmented capacity of Azure.

Today, we are proud to announce three new focused dedicated Azure offers that continue to deliver on the promise of supercomputing in the cloud.

Cray ClusterStor in Azure

HPC simulations continue to demand more from storage ― more performance and more capacity ― and this imperative remains a key requirement for high-performance workloads in the cloud.

Our answer is the new Cray ClusterStor in Azure storage system ― an incredibly scalable, competitively priced option for your high-performance storage needs. It provides more than 3 times the throughput in GB/s per Lustre® object storage servers (OSS) than the currently available Lustre offer.

Cray ClusterStor in Azure offers a Lustre-based, single-tenant, bare metal, and fully managed HPC environment in Microsoft Azure, available in easy-to-consume small, medium, and large configurations ― delivering the exact performance, speed, scalability, data protection, and availability required.

Cray ClusterStor in Azure can be used with Cray XC and CS series supercomputers and also now supports data processing of HPC jobs executed on H-series virtual machines from Azure. It provides Azure HPC with a high capacity and high throughput storage solution to accelerate your HPC simulations.

While being a bare metal appliance dedicated to you, it is also fully integrated in the Azure fabric and accessible by a large selection of other Azure services. With Cray ClusterStor in Azure, you now have the flexibility to locally move your data from high-performance scratch, to warm Azure blob storage and cold archive storage.

The best of all worlds: get access to high performance and capacity during simulation and move post-simulation data to a redundant, less-expensive cloud storage solution, to either be easily distributed or made available for your next simulation.

Cray in Azure for Manufacturing

The manufacturing world is rapidly evolving, requiring industry leaders to think through technical matters such as additive manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factories, autonomous robots, augmented reality, and more.

To help our manufacturing customers with this challenge, the Cray in Azure for Manufacturing Azure-dedicated environment offers a cost-effective, comprehensive, custom solution for HPC workloads like computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), and crash simulation / analysis.

This cloud option offers:
– Dedicated Azure instance (vs. sharing and being at the mercy of compute availability and no degradation of performance)
– Full support for specific network, compute, storage, orchestration, and management requirements
– Option to mix virtual machines and bare metal solutions to deliver the best flexibility/performance ratio for each workload
– Flexible pricing models for high utilization, fixed capacity, or burst/hybrid needs

Enabling various critical stages of your manufacturing process, from formal verification and simulation, to place and route layout, and static timing analysis, Cray in Azure for Manufacturing provides you the power and scale you need in a flexible cloud model. And all this in a single-tenant, bare metal, and fully managed HPC environment in Microsoft Azure.

Cray in Azure for Electronic Design Automation

As an extension of evolving manufacturing needs, the electronic design automation (EDA) space is also transforming. In addition to the same concerns most manufacturers are dealing with, EDA workloads introduce ideas such as “silicon compilers,” 3D monolithic system-on-chip, guaranteed architectures for physical security, and other post-Moore era technologies.

To assist the effort, Microsoft and Cray are offering the Cray in Azure for EDA Azure-dedicated solution ― a non-virtualized Cray system to run your EDA applications and workloads at any scale.

Featuring a unique system configuration enabling high-level performance and high scalability, as well as a significant memory footprint, the Cray in Azure for EDA option is a tremendous option for those designing complex, one-of-a-kind electronic systems.

Available in small, medium, and large configurations, the Cray in Azure for EDA offer provides a robustly engineered configuration of balanced high-end processors and memory, best suited for EDA workloads, with full support for EDA specific network, compute, storage, orchestration, and management requirements.

Learn more

Accelerate your digital transformation with Cray in Azure. With these new Cray in Azure options, you can execute your most demanding HPC applications and workloads with uncompromising performance and scalability in Azure.

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Source: Cray