Microsoft has launched its latest Azure virtual machines optimized for AI supercomputing, the ND H200 v5 series.
As the AI landscape rapidly evolves, the need for scalable, high-performance infrastructure continues to grow exponentially. Microsoft's customers rely on Azure AI infrastructure to develop innovative AI-driven solutions, which is why the company is delivering new cloud-based AI-supercomputing clusters built with Azure ND H200 v5 series virtual machines (VMs). These VMs are now generally available and are tailored to handle the growing complexity of advanced AI workloads, from foundational model training to generative inferencing.
One of the most interesting aspects of the ND H200 v5 is its ability to address the bottleneck caused by GPUs growing in raw computational capability at a much faster rate than the attached memory and memory bandwidth. The ND H200 v5 series VMs deliver a significant increase in High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) capacity and bandwidth, allowing GPUs to access model parameters faster. This results in reduced overall application latency, which is critical for real-time applications such as interactive agents.
Furthermore, the ND H200 v5 VMs can accommodate more complex Large Language Models (LLMs) within the memory of a single VM. This eliminates the need to run distributed jobs over multiple VMs, improving performance and reducing complexity.
Finally, the ND H200 v5 comes pre-integrated with Azure services such as Azure Batch, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure OpenAI Service, and Azure Machine Learning. These integrations make it easy for businesses to get started with the new VMs, making them an attractive option for organizations looking to leverage the power of AI supercomputing.
