Edit

ND A100 v4-series

  • Article

Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets

The ND A100 v4 series virtual machine(VM) is a new flagship addition to the Azure GPU family. It's designed for high-end Deep Learning training and tightly coupled scale-up and scale-out HPC workloads.

The ND A100 v4 series starts with a single VM and eight NVIDIA Ampere A100 40GB Tensor Core GPUs. ND A100 v4-based deployments can scale up to thousands of GPUs with an 1.6 TB/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM. Each GPU within the VM is provided with its own dedicated, topology-agnostic 200 GB/s NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand connection. These connections are automatically configured between VMs occupying the same VM scale set, and support GPUDirect RDMA.

Each GPU features NVLINK 3.0 connectivity for communication within the VM, and the instance is backed by 96 physical 2nd-generation AMD Epyc™ 7V12 (Rome) CPU cores.

These instances provide excellent performance for many AI, ML, and analytics tools that support GPU acceleration 'out-of-the-box,' such as TensorFlow, Pytorch, Caffe, RAPIDS, and other frameworks. Additionally, the scale-out InfiniBand interconnect is supported by a large set of existing AI and HPC tools that are built on NVIDIA's NCCL2 communication libraries for seamless clustering of GPUs.

Important

To get started with ND A100 v4 VMs, refer to HPC Workload Configuration and Optimization for steps including driver and network configuration. Due to increased GPU memory I/O footprint, the ND A100 v4 requires the use of Generation 2 VMs and marketplace images. The Azure HPC images are strongly recommended. Azure HPC Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 and Azure HPC CentOS 7.9 images are supported.


Premium Storage: Supported
Premium Storage caching: Supported
Ultra Disks: Supported (Learn more about availability, usage, and performance)
Live Migration: Not Supported
Memory Preserving Updates: Not Supported
VM Generation Support: Generation 2
Accelerated Networking: Supported
Ephemeral OS Disks: Supported
InfiniBand: Supported, GPUDirect RDMA, 8 x 200 Gigabit HDR
NVIDIA NVLink Interconnect: Supported
Nested Virtualization: Not Supported

The ND A100 v4 series supports the following kernel versions:
CentOS 7.9 HPC: 3.10.0-1160.24.1.el7.x86_64
Ubuntu 18.04: 5.4.0-1043-azure
Ubuntu 20.04: 5.4.0-1046-azure

Size vCPU Memory: GiB Temp Storage (SSD): GiB GPU GPU Memory: GiB Max data disks Max uncached disk throughput: IOPS / MBps Max network bandwidth Max NICs
Standard_ND96asr_v4 96 900 6000 8 A100 40 GB GPUs (NVLink 3.0) 40 32 80,000 / 800 24,000 Mbps 8

Size table definitions

  • Storage capacity is shown in units of GiB or 1024^3 bytes. When you compare disks measured in GB (1000^3 bytes) to disks measured in GiB (1024^3) remember that capacity numbers given in GiB may appear smaller. For example, 1023 GiB = 1098.4 GB.

  • Disk throughput is measured in input/output operations per second (IOPS) and MBps where MBps = 10^6 bytes/sec.

  • Data disks can operate in cached or uncached modes. For cached data disk operation, the host cache mode is set to ReadOnly or ReadWrite. For uncached data disk operation, the host cache mode is set to None.

  • To learn how to get the best storage performance for your VMs, see Virtual machine and disk performance.

  • Expected network bandwidth is the maximum aggregated bandwidth allocated per VM type across all NICs, for all destinations. For more information, see Virtual machine network bandwidth.

    Upper limits aren't guaranteed. Limits offer guidance for selecting the right VM type for the intended application. Actual network performance will depend on several factors including network congestion, application loads, and network settings. For information on optimizing network throughput, see Optimize network throughput for Azure virtual machines. To achieve the expected network performance on Linux or Windows, you may need to select a specific version or optimize your VM. For more information, see Bandwidth/Throughput testing (NTTTCP).

Other sizes and information

Pricing Calculator: Pricing Calculator

For more information on disk types, see What disk types are available in Azure?

Next steps

Learn more about how Azure compute units (ACU) can help you compare compute performance across Azure SKUs.