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'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. These VMs are designed for compute-intensive workloads that need substantial CPU power. Examples include genomic sequencing, engineering simulations, and financial modeling. HB-series VMs use high-performance Intel Xeon Scalable processors and fast memory. HC-series VMs deliver exceptional computational performance and memory bandwidth, for applications that demand intense processing power to handle complex calculations and massive data sets efficiently. They're well-suited for industries such as 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 Virtual Machine (VM)s are built for heavy computing tasks. They handle jobs like analyzing complex structures, studying how molecules behave, and running advanced chemistry simulations. HC VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no hyperthreading. Intel Xeon Platinum processors work with Intel’s software tools, including the Intel Math Kernel Library. They also support advanced vector processing features like AVX-512 for faster calculations.

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 also supports Adaptive Routing and Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT), along with standard Reliable Connection (RC) and Unreliable Datagram (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 - 44 vCPUs Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 (Skylake) [x86-64]
L3 Cache 60.5 MB
Memory 352 GB 190 GB/s
Local Storage 1 Disk 700 GiB
Remote Storage 4 Disks
Network 8 vNICs
1 InfiniBand EDR NIC
40 Gb/s
100 Gb/s
Accelerators None

Other size information

List of all available sizes: Sizes

Pricing Calculator: Pricing Calculator

Information on Disk Types: Disk Types

Next steps

Take advantage of the latest performance and features available for your workloads by changing the size of a virtual machine.

Utilize Microsoft's in-house designed ARM processors with Azure Cobalt VMs.

Learn how to Monitor Azure virtual machines.