Azure HBv5 is Microsoft’s CPU-only node for HPC. Unveiled at SC24, it has a Microsoft-only CPU socket that combines Genoa cores with HBM.

Each node has:1

  • 352 cores of AMD EPYC 9V64H (Genoa)
    • ? GHz base, 4 GHz boost
    • Implemented using four sockets of 96-core CPUs
  • 400-450 GiB HBM3
  • 6.9 TB/s STREAM Triad
  • No DDR DRAM
  • 14 TB TB NVMe (implemented over 8x NVMe disks, likely 1920 GB each)
  • 4x 200G ConnectX-7 NDR InfiniBand (one per socket)
  • 160G Ethernet (2nd generation Azure SmartNIC)

Here’s a photo of the node from the top. You can see it has a very simple motherboard with a very simple power connector:

And here is the rear of the front:

You can see the eight NVMe slots, four ConnectX-7 adapters with a single OSFP each, and a dual-port Azure Boost v2 NIC.

The rear of the node just has a dual-zone bus bar clip for power.

Footnotes

  1. Announcing Azure HBv5 Virtual Machines: A Breakthrough in Memory Bandwidth for HPC