'HB' sub-family storage optimized VM size series

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

The 'HB' subfamily of VM size series are one of Azure's high-performance computing (HPC) optimized H-family VM instances. They're designed for compute-intensive workloads, such as computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, and large-scale scientific simulations. High-performance AMD EPYC processors and fast memory on HB-series VMs offer exceptional CPU and memory bandwidth, making them ideal for applications that require extensive computational resources to perform large-scale calculations and data processing. This makes them well suited for industries like engineering, scientific research, and data analysis where processing speed and accuracy are critical for productivity and innovation.

Workloads and use cases

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD): HB-family VMs are ideal for simulations in fields like aerospace, automotive design, and manufacturing, where fluid dynamics calculations are intensive.

Finite Element Analysis (FEA): HB-family VMs are suitable for engineering analyses that simulate physical phenomena, requiring intensive computational power to model complex systems and materials.

Weather Forecasting: HB-family VMs can handle the massive datasets and complex simulations required for high-resolution weather modeling and forecasting.

Seismic Processing: Used in the oil and gas industry, HB-family VMs can process seismic data to help map and understand subsurface structures.

Scientific Research: HB-family VMs support a wide range of scientific research that requires large-scale mathematical modeling, including physics and computational chemistry simulations.

Genomics and Bioinformatics: HB-family VMs are also used in life sciences for genomic analysis, where large amounts of data need to be processed quickly to decode genetic information.

Series in family

HBv3-series

HBv3-series VMs are optimized for HPC applications such as fluid dynamics, explicit and implicit finite element analysis, weather modeling, seismic processing, reservoir simulation, and RTL simulation. HBv3 VMs feature up to 120 AMD EPYC™ 7V73X (Milan-X) CPU cores, 448 GB of RAM, and no simultaneous multithreading. HBv3-series VMs also provide 350 GB/sec of memory bandwidth (amplified up to 630 GB/s), up to 96 MB of L3 cache per core (1.536 GB total per VM), up to 7 GB/s of block device SSD performance, and clock frequencies up to 3.5 GHz. All HBv3-series VMs feature 200 Gb/sec HDR InfiniBand from NVIDIA Networking to enable supercomputer-scale MPI workloads. These VMs are connected in a non-blocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. The HDR InfiniBand fabric also supports Adaptive Routing and the Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT, in additional to standard RC and UD transports). These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is strongly recommended.

View the full hbv3-series page.

Previous-generation HB 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.