Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that Microsoft Azure is offering 200 gigabit HDR InfiniBand to connect their new cloud instances, increasing scalability and efficiency of high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence and other compute and data intensive applications. Mellanox’s 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand connectivity enables extremely low latencies, high data throughput, and smart In-Network Computing acceleration engines. Customers can use the standard Mellanox software drivers just as they would for a bare metal environment. And with the support of RDMA verbs, they can use all InfiniBand based MPIs, such as Mellanox HPC-X, MVAPICH2, Platform MPI, Intel MPI and others. Customers can also leverage hardware offloads of MPI collectives to realize additional performance, as well as efficiency gains for commercially licensed applications. Third party performance testing conducted by Ohio State University, using 100 gigabit EDR InfiniBand connectivity, has demonstrated up to 13 times better performance than an alternative cloud offering that uses home-grown 100 gigabit Ethernet connectivity.