Microsoft partners with Cray to bring supercomputers to Azure

Microsoft has announced today a new strategic alliance with Cray Inc, a global company that develops supercomputers, big data storage and analytics solutions for scientists and engineers. The new partnership is meant to bring the power of Cray’s supercomputers to Azure, making it even more interesting for Azure customers to run their most important workloads in the cloud.

“This announcement is yet another step to help our customers harness the power of HPC and AI in an agile and cost-effective way,” explained Jason Zander, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure team in a blog post today. “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.” In a separate press release, the global supercomputer leader shared more details about the new offering:

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 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.

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray added that this new new partnership with Microsoft “gives customers the cloud-based supercomputing capabilities they need to increase their competitive advantage.” You can learn more about Cray in Azure on the company’s website.