Cray will be give the Volish cloud supercomputing systems, allowing Azure customers to accelerate their high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Microsoft Azure Team corporate vice president Jason Zander said that Microsoft and Cray were working together to bring customers the right combination of extreme performance, scalability, and elasticity. Because nothing says there's more useful than a supercomputer which you can ping at your rivals.

"Customers can get a dedicated Cray XC or CS series supercomputer in Azure to run HPC and AI applications alongside their other cloud workloads directly on the Azure network."

Zander said that the systems will seamlessly slip into the existing Azure cloud service portfolio because you might have noticed that clouds have a lot of seams normally.

Cray's technology integrates with Azure Virtual Machines on the computing front and Data Lake for storage. In terms of artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, the systems will also support Microsoft's AI platform and Azure Machine Learning, Zander said.

According to Peter Ungaro, Cray CEO and president and, the arrival of his company's high-end systems on Microsoft's cloud makes supercomputing attainable to more enterprises.

"Our partnership with Microsoft will introduce Cray supercomputers to a whole new class of customers that need the most advanced computing resources to expand their problem-solving capabilities, but want this new capability available to them in the cloud", he said.