Microsoft has partnered with a global developer of supercomputers. In an announcement today, the company’s Azure team says a collaboration with Cray Inc. will bring supercomputer power to the cloud platform.
Cray Inc. specializes in big data storage and analytics solutions. The company’s supercomputers are valued by scientists and engineers. For Azure customers, the partnership will allow cloud users to run their most demanding and important workloads.
“This announcement is yet another step to help our customers harness the power of HPC and AI in an agile and cost-effective way,” says Microsoft.
“At Microsoft, we believe access to Big Computing capabilities in the cloud has the power to transform many businesses and will be at the forefront of breakthrough experimentation and innovation in the decades to come.”
Cloud customers on Microsoft’s platform can get supercomputing power to enhance their problem-solving abilities. The companies say new customers who have previously not been able to use on-premises Cray systems will now get the same power through the cloud.
Researchers, scientists, analysts, and more will have the power to manage and train AI deep learning systems. Microsoft says the release benefits industries as diverse as medical imaging and autonomous vehicles.
In a separate press release, Cray discussed the importance of the collaboration:
“As part of the partnership agreement, the Cray XS 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 easily 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.”
Competing with Amazon
Microsoft continues to boost Azure’s capabilities as the company continued to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Last week the company announced a cloud map that shows the core differences between the two leading cloud service providers.
