Yesterday Microsoft announced that they had expanded the availability of their HC series virtual machines (VMs) to Azure's East US region. The series was previously available only in West US 2, so HC series VMs are now an option in two regions, East US and West US 2.
The HC series is one of three options in Microsoft Azure's high-performance computing (HPC) VM offerings. The H series offers a wide variety of general-purpose nodes. The HB series is designed for applications that are memory bound. In contrast, the HC series has only a single configuration and targets applications that are computationally bound while remaining more cost efficient than some of the other computationally focused Azure offerings. Some use cases MS Azure recommends for the HC are fluid dynamics, explicit finite element analysis, and weather modeling.
HC series VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core with no hyperthreading. The Intel Xeon Platinum platform features an all-cores peak clock speed of 3.4 GHz. In terms of storage, Azure offers 700GB of local NVMe storage and up to 4 Managed Disks. The HC series also supports both Azure's Premium Storage and Premium Storage caching.
Availability
Immediately in East US and West US 2 Azure regions. Expected Q3 in South Central US Azure regions.
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