Azure Cobalt Offers Sustainable and High-Performance Computing

Azure Cobalt is a game-changer for high-performance computing. It's built on the Azure platform, which means it inherits all the scalability and reliability you'd expect from a leading cloud provider.

With Azure Cobalt, you can expect significant performance boosts, thanks to its optimized architecture and high-speed data transfer capabilities. This makes it an ideal choice for applications that require intense computational power.

One key benefit of Azure Cobalt is its sustainability features, which help reduce its carbon footprint. This is achieved through the use of energy-efficient hardware and smart cooling systems, making it a more eco-friendly option than traditional data centers.

Azure Cobalt 100 VMs provide a significant boost in performance and cost-efficiency for customers using Azure Databricks.

These VMs, built with Arm architecture, are designed to power scale-out, cloud-native solutions. They deliver up to 40% better performance than the previous generation of Arm-based VMs.

Customers using the classic Jobs offering on Azure Databricks can leverage these benefits by selecting Cobalt 100 VMs as cluster nodes for their ETL jobs and batch processing.

Check this out: Azure 100

The general availability of Azure Cobalt 100 VMs marks an important milestone in the partnership between Azure and Microsoft, showcasing their joint efforts to provide best-in-class experiences for Azure Databricks customers.

Cobalt 100 VMs offer the flexibility and power needed to drive business outcomes, whether running complex data analytics, accelerating ML workflows, or optimizing SQL queries.

Ready to explore the capabilities of Azure Cobalt 100 VMs?

Azure Cobalt is now available in several major regions, including Central US, East US 2, West Europe, Germany West Central, and Japan East.

This global availability is a significant advantage, as it allows Azure Databricks customers to access Cobalt 100 VMs across a broader range of geographies, ensuring global reach and compliance with data sovereignty requirements.

By expanding to more regions in 2024, Azure Cobalt will become even more accessible worldwide.

Cobalt 100 VMs are built with an energy-efficient Arm-based architecture, which reduces the power consumption of data operations.

This energy-efficient design enables Azure Databricks to optimize its cloud infrastructure while delivering high performance.

As a result, Azure Cobalt brings sustainability benefits to Azure Databricks, aligning with the growing demand for environmentally responsible cloud solutions.

The Azure Cobalt 100 is a powerhouse for High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads, with every major application and framework in the open-source HPC ecosystem supported.

Major commercial simulations from companies like Altair, ANSYS, and Siemens also run smoothly on Arm architecture, making the Azure Cobalt 100 a versatile choice.

Across all HPC workloads, the Azure Cobalt 100 offers impressive performance uplifts of 50-90% compared to the previous generation Neoverse N1 instances.

High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads on Azure Cobalt 100 offer a significant performance boost, with improvements ranging from 50-90% compared to the previous generation Neoverse N1 instances.

Companies like Altair, ANSYS, and Siemens have already started supporting Arm architecture, making Azure Cobalt 100 a ready-to-deploy solution for HPC workloads.

The performance per dollar on Azure Cobalt 100 has increased between 60-110%, making it a cost-effective option for businesses.

Rescale, a pioneer in HPC solutions, is an early adopter of Azure Cobalt 100, enabling them to support their customers with a broad selection of R&D applications fully integrated with the platform.

Joris Poort, CEO of Rescale, has seen firsthand the benefits of HPC workloads on Azure Cobalt 100, which accelerates product development and delivers engineering breakthroughs.

Arm has seen significant performance and efficiency gains when deploying internal EDA workloads on Azure Cobalt 100.

In testing, we’ve seen a 1.5-2x acceleration compared to the previous generation Neoverse N1-based Azure VMs for key workloads.

By harnessing the combined strengths of Arm’s processor technology and Azure’s cloud infrastructure, we are committed to empowering our customer ecosystem to accelerate innovation.

General-Purpose and Memory-Optimized Workloads can run on the system with minimal configuration changes.

The system supports a wide range of general-purpose workloads, including web servers, databases, and file servers, with performance that is comparable to specialized hardware.

Many applications can run with minimal tuning, thanks to the system's ability to automatically adjust performance settings.

For memory-optimized workloads, the system provides a range of tuning options to optimize memory usage and improve performance.

Microsoft is using its in-house successor to the Ampere Altra Arm Neoverse N1 chips for its Azure Cobalt 100.

The Azure Cobalt 100 is a 128-core Arm Neoverse N2 design, utilizing Arm's accelerated path to chip design to create a lower-power chip.

Microsoft will deploy its Azure Cobalt 100 in 2024, with a general availability (GA) expected the same year.

Arm's CSS N2 design allows for the creation of a 128-core theoretical device in each socket of a dual-socket server.

This design is made possible by Arm's provision of ready-built IP blocks of many cores, such as the 64-core IP block arranged in dual core compute tiles.

Arm helped a hyper-scale customer go from project start to silicon in 13 months, a feat that suggests Microsoft might be the customer in question.