One of the interesting elements of the launch of the “Milano” series AMD EPYC 7003 last month was the availability on the same day in public clouds. Microsoft, one of AMD’s cloud partners, has been working closely to make it available on launch day in their public cloud using EPYC 7003 series processors with the new “HBv3” instances focused on high-performance virtual machines (HPCs). Here are some benchmarks of Azure HPv3 instances compared to previous generation HP Azure HPC instances available on demand in their cloud.
Azure HBv3 VMs are the first instances of Microsoft to use AMD EPYC Milan processors that offer ~ 19% higher per-core performance than previous EPYC 7002 Rome processors. As we have shown in the landmarks since the launch, the improvements in Milan are legitimate and offer extraordinary generational improvements, as well as extremely competitive with current Intel Xeon processors … (Well, at least for the Intel processors I tested I still haven’t Ice Lake server parts, and I haven’t seen Ice Lake available from public cloud providers yet.)
HBv3 VMs allow up to 120 cores per VM and multiple virtual machines can communicate via Infiniband HDR 200 Gb RDMA for MPI workloads. Currently, HBv3 instances use EPYC 7V13 processors, which are 64-core / 128-threads per socket, and thus in a dual socket configuration can supply up to 128 Zen 3 physical cores. EPYC 7V13 has clocks up to 3.675 GHz. The HB120rs_v3 instance exceeds 120 cores, the rest of the cores being dedicated to the hypervisor. This Standard_HB120rs_v3 instance, in addition to 120 cores, comes with 448 GB of RAM (standard on all HBv3 instances at the moment) and 960 GB NVMe dual-state drives and as mentioned Mellanox 200 Gb RDMA for MPI workloads . The rest of the HBv3 range remains at the specifications of 448 GB RAM / dual 960 GB NVMe / HDR 200 Gb RDMA, while offering a smaller number of cores.
More details about Microsoft Azure HBv3 VMs can be found at azure.microsoft.com and the HBv3 series documentation.
Microsoft has given us access to their 120-core HBv3 instance (Standard_HB120rs_v3), as well as previous-generation Azure HPC instances, to see how generational performance and competition compare to Microsoft’s public cloud. In today’s testing, we only look at VM performance for each instance type, rather than a loop in multiple VMs for MPI workloads, and so on.
The HPC Azure VMs that Microsoft offered us for free for benchmarking included:
Azure HBv3 – EPYC 7V13 – The new virtual machine based in Milan, with 442 GB RAM and 960 GB dual NVMe SSD. The price per VM per hour on request is 3.60 USD. (Update: due to a typo in the Microsoft information, the previous review of this article indicated the price of $ 2.70.)
Azure HBv2 – EPYC 7V12 – AMD EPYC 7002 Rome HPC virtual machine with 120 cores, 456 GB RAM and a single 960 GB NVMe SSD. The price of VM per hour on request is 2.70 USD.
Azure HBv1 – EPYC 7551 – The first generation of AMD EPYC Naples HPC virtual machines with 60 cores, 240 GB RAM and 700 GB SSD. The price of VM per hour on request is 2.28 USD.
Azure HC – Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 – Dual scalable Xeon Skylake processors that supply 44 cores to the VM with 352 GB RAM and 700 GB SSD. The price of VM per hour on request is 3,168 USD.
Azure H – Intel Xeon E5-2667 v3 – This is the original Microsoft Azure HPC instance type with Haswell E5-2667 v3 processors for reference. This Azure H instance offers 16 cores with 228 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD. The price of VM per hour on request is USD 1,599.
All these Microsoft Azure instances have been compared to CentOS 8 with the Linux 4.18 kernel. The prices listed are from the Microsoft region of the eastern United States at the time of writing. Obviously, if you choose a reserved court or other means, there is the possibility of different prices.
In addition to examining the gross performance for each of these types of VMs, performance per dollar was also generated based on the time monitored by Phoronix Test Suite on the run and the use of Microsoft Azure on-demand costs.