Microsoft now has one of the world’s fastest supercomputers (and no, it doesn’t run on Windows)

A Microsoft Azure supercomputer dubbed ‘Voyager-EUS2’ has made it into the rankings of the world’s 10 quickest machines. 

Microsoft’s supercomputer, with a benchmark velocity of 30 Petaflops per second (Pflop/s) continues to be nicely behind China’s Tianhe-2A and the US Division of Power’s IBM-based Summit supercomputer, however it’s the one main cloud supplier with a supercomputer ranked within the prime 10 within the high-performance computing (HPC) Top500 list.

Voyager-EUS2 was the one new entrant within the Top500’s prime 10 record of the world’s quickest supercomputers, which was led by Japan’s Fugaku with 7.63 million cores and a Linpack benchmark rating of 442 Pflop/s. 

‘Flops’ refers to floating level operations per second, indicating the efficiency of supercomputers which can be usually utilized in science — to simulate climate patterns, for instance — that always run on programming languages like Fortran.  

See additionally: Home windows 11 FAQ: Our improve information and all the pieces else it is advisable to know.

Fugaku’s benchmark places it 3 times forward of the US Division of Power-sponsored Summit supercomputer, which is the US’s quickest high-performance pc (HPC) with a Linpack rating of 148.8 Pflop/s. It is primarily based on IBM’s Power9 CPUs and options 4,356 nodes with 22 cores every backed by six Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs. 

The fourth working is Sierra, a supercomputer on the College of California’s Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory. It is also powered by Power9 CPUs and Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs, scoring 94.6 Pflop/s.

Whereas ranked tenth, Microsoft’s Azure supercomputer is the standout on this rating of the world’s quickest supercomputers as the one new entrant within the prime 10 record and is the one public cloud supplier to achieve this rating. 

Microsoft’s Voyager-EUS2, which runs from its Azure East US 2 area, is notable for a number of causes. First, however not surprisingly, it is working a Linux distribution, particularly the Ubuntu 18.04 long run servicing (LTS) version. It is bought 253,440 cores on AMD EPYC CPUs. 

It isn’t stunning that the Azure supercomputer is working Ubuntu, given Linux already runs many of the VMs in Microsoft’s cloud. Additionally, Linux distributions run on all of the world’s greatest supercomputers.   

“Voyager-EUS2, a Microsoft Azure system put in at Microsoft within the U.S., is the one new system within the TOP10,” says Top500.org. 

“It achieved 30.05 Pflop/s and is listed at No. 10. This structure relies on an AMD EPYC processor with 48 cores and a couple of.45GHz working along with an NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80GB reminiscence and using a Mellanox HDR Infiniband for knowledge switch.” 

See additionally: Gartner releases its 2021 rising tech hype cycle: This is what’s in and headed out.

Microsoft boasted this week that its Azure cloud now has 5 supercomputers within the High 500 record. Microsoft is utilizing supercomputers for synthetic intelligence (AI) and promoting its Azure HPCs as a service.      

It additionally announced common availability of the Azure digital machine (VM) referred to as the “NDm A100 v4 Collection”, which options Nvidia A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs – double the Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs.