In order to help businesses train, deploy, and scale AI, including large, cutting-edge models, NVIDIA and Microsoft today announced a multi-year partnership to create one of the most potent AI supercomputers in the world. Microsoft and NVIDIA Work Together to Create a Powerful Cloud AI Computer
This supercomputer will be powered by Microsoft Azure’s cutting-edge supercomputing infrastructure in conjunction with NVIDIA GPUs, networking, and full stack AI software.
With the help of Microsoft Azure’s cutting-edge supercomputing infrastructure, NVIDIA GPUs, networking, and a full stack of AI software, the two companies today announced a multi-year partnership to build one of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world. This collaboration will enable businesses to train, deploy, and scale AI, including large, cutting-edge models.
Powerful and scalable ND- and NC-series virtual machines geared for distributed AI training and inference are part of Azure’s cloud-based AI supercomputer. The NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, along with hundreds of NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs, NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking, make it the first public cloud to use NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI stack.
Microsoft and NVIDIA Work Together to Create a Powerful Cloud AI Computer
NVIDIA will work with Azure to research and accelerate advancements in generative AI, a rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence where foundational models like the Megatron Turing NLG 530B serve as the basis for unsupervised, self-learning algorithms to generate new text, code, digital images, video, or audio.
Additionally, the businesses will work together to improve Microsoft’s Deep Speed deep learning optimization tool. Azure enterprise clients will have access to NVIDIA’s full suite of AI processes and software development kits that have been tailored for Azure.
“AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating. The breakthrough of foundation models has triggered a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups and enabled new enterprise applications,” said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. “Our collaboration with Microsoft will provide researchers and companies with state-of-the-art AI infrastructure and software to capitalize on the transformative power of AI.”
“AI is fueling the next wave of automation across enterprises and industrial computing, enabling organizations to do more with less as they navigate economic uncertainties,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud + AI Group at Microsoft. “Our collaboration with NVIDIA unlocks the world’s most scalable supercomputer platform, which delivers state-of-the-art
Scalable Peak Performance With NVIDIA Compute and Quantum-2 InfiniBand on Azure
The AI-optimized virtual machine instances from Microsoft Azure are the first public cloud instances to use NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking and are built with the most cutting-edge data center GPUs. To train even the largest huge language models, create the most intricate recommender systems at scale, and enable generative AI at scale, customers can deploy hundreds of GPUs in a single cluster.
With NVIDIA A100 GPUs, the current Azure instances provide NVIDIA Quantum 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking. Future versions will use NVIDIA H100 GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking. These AI-optimized products, when combined with Azure’s cutting-edge compute cloud infrastructure, networking, and storage, will deliver scalable peak performance for AI training and deep learning inference workloads of any size.
Speeding up AI Development and Use
The platform will also support a wide variety of AI services and applications, such as Microsoft Deep Speed and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software package.
In order to accelerate transformer-based models used for huge language models, generative AI, and generating code, among other uses, Microsoft Deep Speed will make use of the NVIDIA H100 Transformer Engine. With twice the throughput of 16-bit operations, this technology uses Deep Speed’s 8-bit floating point precision capabilities to significantly speed up AI calculations for transformers.
The widely used software of the NVIDIA AI platform, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, is approved and supported on Microsoft Azure instances with NVIDIA A100 GPUs. In a subsequent software update, support for Azure instances with NVIDIA H100 GPUs will be introduced.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise streamlines every stage of the AI workflow, from data processing and AI model training to simulation and large-scale deployment. It includes the NVIDIA Riva for speech AI and NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity application frameworks.