Intel and Microsoft Azure™
Intel and Microsoft collaborate closely to ensure that the Microsoft Azure* cloud computing platform is optimized for the latest Intel® technologies, delivering a broad portfolio of intelligent services.
- Azure Stack Edge*
- Cognitive Services*
- Machine Learning*
- Virtual Machines*
- IOT*
- Microsoft Visual Studio*
A pre-configured Data Science Virtual Machine with CPU-optimized TensorFlow and MXNet
The Intel® Optimized Data Science Virtual Machine (DSVM) is an extension of the Ubuntu version of Microsoft’s DSVM and comes with Python environments optimized for deep learning on Intel® Xeon® processors.
Azure Stack Edge: Now Available
1U rack-mountable appliance from Microsoft; you sign up and pay-as-you-go just like any other Azure service and the hardware is included. Powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel® SSDs, and Intel® Arria 10 FPGAs to accelerate inferencing of your data, then transfer it to the cloud to re-train and improve your models.
Azure Cognitive Services
Azure Cognitive Services are pre-built, AI-powered algorithms being optimized for Intel® Xeon® processors to eliminate performance bottlenecks in vision, knowledge, language, and search applications.
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning now supports accelerator hardware backed by Project Brainwave. Powered by Intel® FPGAs, Project Brainwave, supports a variety of use cases across search, machine reading comprehension, image processing, and more. Customers gain access to industry-leading inferencing performance on the world's largest configurable cloud.
Azure Virtual Machines
Beyond PaaS solutions like Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft offers a variety of on-demand Intel® Xeon® processor-based Virtual Machines for machine and deep learning applications.
Azure IOT Edge and Intel Vision Processing Units
Azure IoT Edge is a fully managed service that delivers cloud intelligence locally by deploying and running Azure services on an IoT device. Organizations can containerize Azure AI workloads, including Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning, and deploy on various hardware platforms, including new purpose-built accelerator cards, Intel® Movidius™ Vision Processing Units (VPU), and a high-performance Intel® Arria® 10 FPGA.
Intel Dev Cloud now Available on Azure Marketplace
The Intel® DevCloud for the Edge allows you to actively prototype and experiment with AI workloads for computer vision on Intel hardware.
No hardware setup required on your end. The Intel® DevCloud for the Edge utilizes Jupyter* Notebooks to execute code directly within the Web browser.
Windows ML
Unlike training ML models, which can be enormously demanding in terms of both time and computational power, generating inferences based on those models requires fewer resources by comparison and can be done effectively on client platforms and edge devices.
Open Neural Network Exchange* (ONNX*)
Open Neural Network Exchange* (ONNX*) is an open ecosystem for interchangeable AI models. Intel and Microsoft are co-engineering powerful tools based on the open source ONNX Runtime so developers can build applications that take advantage of the latest AI-boosting features.
Microsoft Bing*
Microsoft Bing* also uses Project Brainwave in large production uses cases. One example is machine reading comprehension, which “reads” the web, understands the results, and serves up results most related to your query. This saves times and provides more value to the user.
How to Get Started on Azure
Azure virtual machines (VMs) can be created through the Azure portal. This method provides a browser-based user interface to create VMs and their associated resources. This quickstart shows you how to use the Azure portal to deploy a virtual machine (VM) in Azure that runs Windows Server 2016. To see your VM in action, you then RDP to the VM and install the IIS web server.
- Choose Create a resource in the upper left-hand corner of the Azure portal.
- In the search box above the list of Azure Marketplace resources, search for and select Windows Server 2016 Datacenter, then choose Create.
- In the Basics tab, under Project details, make sure the correct subscription is selected and then choose to Create new resource group. Type myResourceGroup for the name.
- Get remaining instructions from here
Industry Partnerships
Carnegie Mellon University, recognized as one of the leading global research institutions, announced a $27.5 million semiconductor research initiative to connect edge devices to the cloud, partnering with Intel and using the Azure Stack Edge and Azure Stack for advanced AI at the edge.
Learn More & Contact
To learn more about Intel technologies for AI applications in the cloud, visit intel.ai or contact your Intel representative.
And for more information about the Microsoft AI capabilities, visit the following sites:
- Microsoft Cognitive Services
- Azure Machine Learning Services
- Azure Machine Learning Studio
- Microsoft DSVMs
- Azure Stack Edge
- Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for AI*
Questions on how your enterprise can leverage the Intel-Microsoft relationship to get started in the cloud with Intel architecture, contact info-ai-sales@intel.com.
Interested in contributing to and learning more about Intel's optimized open-source ML/DL packages, frameworks and libraries, contact developer-advocate@intel.com.
