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Updated NDv2-series

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

The NDv2-series virtual machine is a new addition to the GPU family designed for the needs of the most demanding GPU-accelerated AI, machine learning, simulation, and HPC workloads.

NDv2 is powered by 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 NVLINK-connected GPUs, each with 32 GB of GPU memory. Each NDv2 VM also has 40 non-HyperThreaded Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 (Skylake) cores and 672 GiB of system memory.

NDv2 instances provide excellent performance for HPC and AI workloads utilizing CUDA GPU-optimized computation kernels, and the many AI, ML, and analytics tools that support GPU acceleration 'out-of-box,' such as TensorFlow, Pytorch, Caffe, RAPIDS, and other frameworks.

Critically, the NDv2 is built for both computationally intense scale-up (harnessing 8 GPUs per VM) and scale-out (harnessing multiple VMs working together) workloads. The NDv2 series now supports 100-Gigabit InfiniBand EDR backend networking, similar to that available on the HB series of HPC VM, to allow high-performance clustering for parallel scenarios including distributed training for AI and ML. This backend network supports all major InfiniBand protocols, including those employed by NVIDIA’s NCCL2 libraries, allowing for seamless clustering of GPUs.

Important

When enabling InfiniBand on the ND40rs_v2 VM, please use the 4.7-1.0.0.1 Mellanox OFED driver.

Due to increased GPU memory, the new ND40rs_v2 VM requires the use of Generation 2 VMs and marketplace images.

Please note: The ND40s_v2 featuring 16 GB of per-GPU memory is no longer available for preview and has been superceded by the updated ND40rs_v2.


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
Nvidia NVLink Interconnect: Supported
Nested Virtualization: Not Supported

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_ND40rs_v2 40 672 2948 8 V100 32 GB (NVLink) 32 32 80000 / 800 24000 Mbps 8

Supported operating systems and drivers

To take advantage of the GPU capabilities of Azure N-series VMs, NVIDIA GPU drivers must be installed.

The NVIDIA GPU Driver Extension installs appropriate NVIDIA CUDA or GRID drivers on an N-series VM. Install or manage the extension using the Azure portal or tools such as Azure PowerShell or Azure Resource Manager templates. For general information about VM extensions, see Azure virtual machine extensions and features.

If you choose to install NVIDIA GPU drivers manually, see N-series GPU driver setup for Linux.

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.