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Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets
Important
Azure Virtual Machines HC-series sizes (Standard_HC44rs, Standard_HC44-16rs, Standard_HC44-32rs) retire on May 31, 2027. After this date, Azure deallocates HC-series VMs, stops running them, and you no longer incur charges. HC-series VMs don't have an SLA or support after retirement. Sales of 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances for HC-series ended on April 2, 2026. For more information, see Modernize your HC-series virtual machines by May 31, 2027.
Performance testing was conducted across multiple HC-series sizes. The following table summarizes key findings from these tests.
| Workload | HC |
|---|---|
| STREAM Triad | 190 GB/s (Intel MLC AVX-512) |
| High-Performance Linpack (HPL) | 3520 GigaFLOPS (Rpeak), 2970 GigaFLOPS (Rmax) |
| RDMA latency & bandwidth | 1.05 microseconds, 96.8 Gb/s |
| FIO on local NVMe SSD | 1.3 GB/s reads, 900 MB/s writes |
| IOR on 4 Azure Premium SSD (P30 managed disks, RAID0)** | 780 MB/s reads, 780 MB/writes |
MPI latency
MPI latency test from the OSU Micro-Benchmarks (OMB) suite is run. Sample scripts are on GitHub
./bin/mpirun_rsh -np 2 -hostfile ~/hostfile MV2_CPU_MAPPING=[INSERT CORE #] ./osu_latency
MPI bandwidth
MPI bandwidth test from the OSU microbenchmark suite is run. Sample scripts are on GitHub
./mvapich2-2.3.install/bin/mpirun_rsh -np 2 -hostfile ~/hostfile MV2_CPU_MAPPING=[INSERT CORE #] ./mvapich2-2.3/osu_benchmarks/mpi/pt2pt/osu_bw
Mellanox Perftest
The Mellanox Perftest package has many InfiniBand tests such as latency (ib_send_lat) and bandwidth (ib_send_bw). An example command is below.
numactl --physcpubind=[INSERT CORE #] ib_send_lat -a
Next steps
- Read about the latest announcements, HPC workload examples, and performance results at the Azure Compute Tech Community Blogs.
- For a higher-level architectural view of running HPC workloads, see High Performance Computing (HPC) on Azure.