Cray and Microsoft Bring Supercomputing to Microsoft Azure

Cray announced a strategic alliance with Microsoft Corp. Under the partnership agreement, Microsoft and Cray will offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable customers to run AI, advanced analytics and modeling and simulation workloads at scale, connected to the Azure cloud.

“Our partnership with Microsoft will introduce Cray supercomputers to a whole new class of customers that need the most advanced computing resources to expand their problem-solving capabilities, but want this new capability available to them in the cloud,” says Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray.

“Using the enterprise-proven power of Microsoft Azure, customers are running their most strategic workloads in our cloud,” says Jason Zander, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp. “More importantly, we’re moving customers into a new era by empowering them to use HPC and AI to drive breakthrough advances in science, engineering and health.”

As part of the partnership agreement, the Cray XC  and Cray CS supercomputers with attached Cray ClusterStor storage systems will be available for customer-specific provisioning in select Microsoft Azure datacenters, directly connected to the Microsoft Azure network. The Cray systems integrate with Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Data Lake storage, the Microsoft AI platform, and Azure Machine Learning services. Customers can also leverage the Cray Urika-XC analytics software suite and CycleCloud for hybrid HPC management.

For more information, visit Microsoft Azure and Cray.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.