'HB' sub-family storage optimized VM size series
Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets
The 'HB' subfamily of VM size series are one of Azure's high-performance computing (HPC) optimized H-family VM instances. They're designed for compute-intensive workloads, such as computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, and large-scale scientific simulations. High-performance AMD EPYC processors and fast memory on HB-series VMs offer exceptional CPU and memory bandwidth, making them ideal for applications that require extensive computational resources to perform large-scale calculations and data processing. This makes them well suited for industries like engineering, scientific research, and data analysis where processing speed and accuracy are critical for productivity and innovation.
Workloads and use cases
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD): HB-family VMs are ideal for simulations in fields like aerospace, automotive design, and manufacturing, where fluid dynamics calculations are intensive.
Finite Element Analysis (FEA): HB-family VMs are suitable for engineering analyses that simulate physical phenomena, requiring intensive computational power to model complex systems and materials.
Weather Forecasting: HB-family VMs can handle the massive datasets and complex simulations required for high-resolution weather modeling and forecasting.
Seismic Processing: Used in the oil and gas industry, HB-family VMs can process seismic data to help map and understand subsurface structures.
Scientific Research: HB-family VMs support a wide range of scientific research that requires large-scale mathematical modeling, including physics and computational chemistry simulations.
Genomics and Bioinformatics: HB-family VMs are also used in life sciences for genomic analysis, where large amounts of data need to be processed quickly to decode genetic information.
Series in family
HB-series V1
HB-series VMs are optimized for applications that are driven by memory bandwidth, such as fluid dynamics, explicit finite element analysis, and weather modeling. HB VMs feature 60 AMD EPYC 7551 processor cores, 4 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no simultaneous multithreading. An HB VM provides up to 260 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. HB-series VMs feature 100 Gb/sec Mellanox EDR InfiniBand. These VMs are connected in a non-blocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. These VMs support Adaptive Routing and the Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT, in addition to standard RC and UD transports). These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is recommended.
| Part | Quantity Count Units |
Specs SKU ID, Performance Units, etc. |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | 60 - 15 vCPUs | AMD EPYC 7551 (Naples) [x86-64] |
| Memory | 228 GiB | |
| Local Storage | 1 Disk | 700 GiB |
| Remote Storage | 4 Disks | |
| Network | 8 NICs | |
| Accelerators | None |
HBv2-series
HBv2-series VMs are optimized for applications that are driven by memory bandwidth, such as fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, and reservoir simulation. HBv2 VMs feature 120 AMD EPYC 7V12 processor cores, 4 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no simultaneous multithreading. Each HBv2 VM provides up to 350 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and up to 4 teraFLOPS of FP64 compute. HBv2-series VMs feature 200 Gb/sec Mellanox HDR InfiniBand. These VMs are connected in a non-blocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. These VMs support Adaptive Routing and the Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT, in addition to standard RC and UD transports). These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is recommended.
View the full hbv2-series page.
| Part | Quantity Count Units |
Specs SKU ID, Performance Units, etc. |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | 120 - 16 vCPUs | AMD EPYC 7V12 (Genoa) [x86-64] |
| Memory | 456 GiB | |
| Local Storage | 1 Temp Disk 1 NVMe Disk |
480 GiB 960 GiB |
| Remote Storage | 8 Disks | |
| Network | 8 NICs | |
| Accelerators | None |
HBv3-series
HBv3-series VMs are optimized for HPC applications such as fluid dynamics, explicit and implicit finite element analysis, weather modeling, seismic processing, reservoir simulation, and RTL simulation. HBv3 VMs feature up to 120 AMD EPYC™ 7V73X (Milan-X) CPU cores, 448 GB of RAM, and no simultaneous multithreading. HBv3-series VMs also provide 350 GB/sec of memory bandwidth (amplified up to 630 GB/s), up to 96 MB of L3 cache per core (1.536 GB total per VM), up to 7 GB/s of block device SSD performance, and clock frequencies up to 3.5 GHz. All HBv3-series VMs feature 200 Gb/sec HDR InfiniBand from NVIDIA Networking to enable supercomputer-scale MPI workloads. These VMs are connected in a non-blocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. The HDR InfiniBand fabric also supports Adaptive Routing and the Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT, in additional to standard RC and UD transports). These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is strongly recommended.
View the full hbv3-series page.
| Part | Quantity Count Units |
Specs SKU ID, Performance Units, etc. |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | 120 - 16 vCPUs | AMD EPYC 7V73X (Milan-X) [x86-64] |
| Memory | 448 GiB | |
| Local Storage | 1 Temp Disk 2 NVMe Disks |
480 GiB 960 GiB |
| Remote Storage | 32 Disks | |
| Network | 8 NICs | |
| Accelerators | None |
HBv4-series
HBv4-series VMs are optimized for various HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, frontend and backend EDA, rendering, molecular dynamics, computational geoscience, weather simulation, and financial risk analysis. HBv4 VMs feature up to 176 AMD EPYC™ 9V33X ("Genoa-X") CPU cores with AMD's 3D V-Cache, clock frequencies up to 3.7 GHz, and no simultaneous multithreading. HBv4-series VMs also provide 768 GB of RAM, 2.3 GB L3 cache. The 2.3 GB L3 cache per VM can deliver up to 5.7 TB/s of bandwidth to amplify up to 780 GB/s of bandwidth from DRAM, for a blended average of 1.2 TB/s of effective memory bandwidth across a broad range of customer workloads. The VMs also provide up to 12 GB/s (reads) and 7 GB/s (writes) of block device SSD performance.
All HBv4-series VMs feature 400 Gb/s NDR InfiniBand from NVIDIA Networking to enable supercomputer-scale MPI workloads. These VMs are connected in a non-blocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. NDR continues to support features like Adaptive Routing and the Dynamically Connected Transport (DCT). This newest generation of InfiniBand also brings greater support for offload of MPI collectives, optimized real-world latencies due to congestion control intelligence, and enhanced adaptive routing capabilities. These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is recommended.
View the full hbv4-series page.
| Part | Quantity Count Units |
Specs SKU ID, Performance Units, etc. |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | 176 - 24 vCPUs | AMD EPYC 9V33X (Genoa-X) [x86-64] |
| Memory | 768 GiB | |
| Local Storage | 1 Temp Disk 2 NVMe Disks |
480 GiB 1800 GiB |
| Remote Storage | 32 Disks | |
| Network | 8 NICs | |
| Accelerators | None |
Previous-generation HB family series
For older sizes, see previous generation sizes.
Other size information
List of all available sizes: Sizes
Pricing Calculator: Pricing Calculator
Information on Disk Types: Disk Types
Next steps
Learn more about how Azure compute units (ACU) can help you compare compute performance across Azure SKUs.
Check out Azure Dedicated Hosts for physical servers able to host one or more virtual machines assigned to one Azure subscription.
Learn how to Monitor Azure virtual machines.