'HC' sub-family storage optimized VM size series

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

The 'HC' family of VM size series are one of Azure's high-performance computing (HPC) optimized VM instances. They're designed for compute-intensive workloads that require substantial CPU power, such as genomic sequencing, engineering simulations, and financial modeling. High-performance Intel Xeon Scalable processors and fast memory on HC-series VMs offer exceptional computational capabilities and memory bandwidth, making them ideal for applications that demand intense processing power to handle complex calculations and massive data sets efficiently. These VMs are designed for sectors like healthcare, finance, and engineering, where rapid data processing and simulation accuracy are critical for advanced research and development.

Workloads and use cases

Genomic Sequencing: HC-series VMs provide the computational power needed for genomic sequencing, enabling researchers to process and analyze large genetic datasets quickly.

Engineering Simulations: Ideal for running complex simulations in fields such as automotive, aerospace, and mechanical engineering. These simulations often include finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).

Financial Modeling: These VMs can handle the high demands of financial applications, including risk analysis and quantitative simulations, which require massive computational resources to execute many calculations quickly.

Scientific Research: HC-series VMs support a wide range of scientific computing needs, particularly in physics and chemistry, where large-scale computations and data analysis are crucial.

Weather Forecasting and Climate Simulation: They are used in meteorology for high-resolution weather modeling and climate simulations, which require processing large datasets and performing complex simulations.

Series in family

HC-series

HC-series VMs are optimized for applications driven by dense computation, such as implicit finite element analysis, molecular dynamics, and computational chemistry. HC VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8,168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no hyperthreading. The Intel Xeon Platinum platform supports Intel’s rich ecosystem of software tools such as the Intel Math Kernel Library and advanced vector processing capabilities such as AVX-512. HC-series VMs feature 100 Gb/sec Mellanox EDR InfiniBand. These VMs are connected in a nonblocking 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 HC-series page.

Part	Quantity Count Units	Specs SKU ID, Performance Units, etc.
Processor	32 - 44vCores	Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 (Skylake)
Memory	352GiB	191GBps
Data Disks	4Disks
Network	8vNICs	Mellanox EDR Infiniband 100Gbps
Accelerators	None

Previous-generation HC 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.