High Performance Capabilities for Windows Azure

Taken from HPCWire Weekly Updates (3 Feb 2014)........

The Windows Azure Cloud Service now includes two new compute-intensive virtual machine sizes. Known as A8 and A9, they are Azure’s most performant instances to date. The A8 instance comes with 8 Intel virtual processor cores and 56 GB of RAM, while A9 comes with 16 such cores and 112 GB of memory. The instance family also includes 40 Gbps InfiniBand networking for low-latency and high-throughput communication.
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The new instance type actually employs two interconnect protocols. Traditional Ethernet is the link to Azure Storage, CDN, and other Windows Azure services or solutions, while a 40 Gbps InfiniBand network connects compute instances within the same Cloud Services deployment. Furthermore, the InfiniBand network employs remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology for maximum efficiency of parallel MPI applications, an enhancement that Microsoft first previewed more than a year ago, when it debuted its Big Compute strategy.

References

1. New High Performance Capabilities for Windows Azure
2. Windows Azure Continues ‘Big Compute’ Rollout