HPC Cloud Updates WE 27 Apr 2025
Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. New VM types from AWS and Azure and a pretty exciting enhancement to VM Scale Sets.
AWS
Optimise Ansys running on AWS with Ansys Gateway (AWS Marketplace offering)
New AZ planned for the N. Virginia region
Channy Yun (윤석찬)
Changes to the Carbon Footprint Tool should help see what how many polar bears your HPC workloads are making homeless
New Graviton4 instances incoming! c8g, m8g and r8g instance types now GA in Ohio, N. Virginia and Oregon.
New Instances: i4g in Sydney, m8g in N. California, r7gd in London, Hyderabad and Osaka, c7gd in Canada (Central), and London, c6id in Paris
Azure
New NVads_v5 VM family powered by AMD 4th Gen EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Pro v710 GPUs
MarcCharest
I’ve often complained we don’t pay enough attention to monitoring and visualisation of HPC workloads, here’s an counterpoint. Somehow though I spent more time wondering if that title picture is AI generated or not (I think it must be) or if that’s some fancy new kind of office/data centre that Microsoft has. Must be noisy in there!
vinilv
Guess that ties in nicely with this new feature in preview too, Metrics usage Insights
This looks very interesting for scaling your compute: Instance Mix for VM Scale Sets. Let’s you mix different VM types in the same Scale Set.
The documentation give more details and if you were thinking of using this to upgrade to the latest generation of VM type but topping up capacity with an older generation then that’s even a suggested use case 😄
There even appears to be a lowest price allocation strategy to automatically deploy the cheapest compute… I wonder if that accounts for performance adjusted pricing. I’m definitely going to have to play with this a bit.
Microsoft’s own blog about it here:
brittanyrowe
My biggest question though, and whilst I’d expect this from AWS, its unusual for Azure: What’s the direction here? Should I be using VM Scale Sets or Azure Compute Fleet? There seems to be a lot of overlap between the two.
Google Cloud
Nothing to see here. Move along folks.
