Microsoft to showcase purpose-built AI infrastructure at NVIDIA GTC

by Contributed | Feb 28, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Join Microsoft at GTC, a global technology conference running March 20 – 23, 2023, to learn how organizations of any size can power AI innovation with purpose-built cloud infrastructure from Microsoft. 

Microsoft’s Azure AI supercomputing infrastructure is uniquely designed for AI workloads and helps build and train some of the industry’s most advanced AI solutions. From data preparation to model and infrastructure performance management, Azure’s comprehensive portfolio of powerful and massively scalable GPU-accelerated virtual machines (VMs) and seamless integration with services like Azure Batch and open-source solutions helps streamline management and automation of large AI models and infrastructure. 

Attend GTC to discover how Azure AI infrastructure optimized for AI performance can deliver speed and scale in the cloud and help you reduce the complexity of building, training, and bringing AI models into production. Register today! GTC Developer Conference is a free online event.  

Microsoft sessions at NVIDIA GTC 

Add the below Microsoft sessions at GTC to your conference schedule to learn about the latest Azure AI infrastructure and dive deep into a variety of use cases and technologies.  

Featured sessions 

Accelerate AI Innovation with Unmatched Cloud Scale and Performance 

Thursday, Mar 23 | 7:00 AM – 7:50 AM MST  

Nidhi Chappell, General Manager, Azure HPC, AI, SAP and Confidential Computing 

Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Azure Marketing, Microsoft 

Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, NVIDIA

Azure’s purpose-built AI infrastructure is enabling leading organizations in AI to build a new era of innovative applications and services. The convergence of cloud flexibility and economics, with advances in cloud performance, is paving the way to accelerate AI initiatives across simulations, science, and industry. Whether you need to scale to 80,000 cores for MPI workloads, or you’re looking for AI supercomputing capabilities, Azure can support your needs. Learn more about Azures AI platform, our latest updates, and hear about customer experiences. 

Azure’s Purpose-Built AI Infrastructure Using the Latest NVIDIA GPU Accelerators 

On-demand 

Matt Vegas, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft 

Microsoft offers some of the most powerful and massively scalable Virtual Machines, optimized for AI workloads. Join us for an in-depth look at the latest updates for Azure’s ND series based on NVIDIA GPUs, engineered to deliver a combination of high-performance, interconnected GPUs, working in parallel, that can help you reduce complexity, minimize operational bottlenecks operations, and can deliver reliability at scale.  

Talks and panel sessions 

Deep Learning Institute Workshops and Labs 

We are proud to host NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) training at NVIDIA GTC. Attend full-day, hands-on, instructor-led workshops or two-hour free training labs to get up to speed on the latest technology and breakthroughs. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, these sessions enable and empower you to leverage NVIDIA GPUs on the Azure platform to solve the world’s most interesting and relevant problems.  

Register for a Deep Learning Institute workshop or lab today! 

Learn more about Azure AI infrastructure 

Whether your project is big or small, local or global, Microsoft Azure is empowering companies worldwide to push the boundaries of AI innovation. Learn how you can make AI your reality.  

Azure AI Infrastructure 

Azure AI Platform  

Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud 

AI-first Infrastructure and Toolchain at Any Scale 

The case for AI in the Azure Cloud 

AI Infrastructure for Smart Manufacturing 

AI Infrastructure for Smart Retail 

[Data Virtualization] May need to update Java (JRE7 only uses TLS 1.0)

by Contributed | Feb 27, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

At end of October 2022 we saw an issue where a customer using PolyBase external query to Azure Storage started seeing queries fail with the following error:

Msg 7320, Level 16, State 110, Line 2

Cannot execute the query “Remote Query” against OLE DB provider “SQLNCLI11” for linked server “(null)”. EXTERNAL TABLE access failed due to internal error: ‘Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ]occurred while accessing external file.’

Prior to this, everything was working fine; the customer made no changes to SQL Server or Azure Storage.

“The server encountered an unknown failure” – not the most descriptive of errors. We checked the PolyBase logs for more information:

10/30/2022 1:12:23 PM [Thread:13000] [EngineInstrumentation:EngineQueryErrorEvent] (Error, High):

EXTERNAL TABLE access failed due to internal error: ‘Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ] occurred while accessing external file.’

Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Common.ErrorHandling.MppSqlException: EXTERNAL TABLE access failed due to internal error: ‘Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ] occurred while accessing external file.’ —> Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.DataMovement.Common.ExternalAccess.HdfsAccessException: Java exception raised on call to HdfsBridge_IsDirExist: Error [com.microsoft.azure.storage.StorageException: The server encountered an unknown failure: ] occurred while accessing external file.

   at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.DataMovement.Common.ExternalAccess.HdfsBridgeFileAccess.GetFileMetadata(String filePath)

   at Microsoft.SqlServer.DataWarehouse.Sql.Statements.HadoopFile.ValidateFile(ExternalFileState fileState, Boolean createIfNotFound)

   — End of inner exception stack trace —

We got a little bit more information. PolyBase Engine is checking for file metadata, but still failing with “unknown failure”.

The engineer working on this case did a network trace and found out that the TLS version used for encrypting the packets sent to Azure Storage was TLS 1.0. The following screenshot demonstrates the analysis (note lower left corner where “Version: TLS 1.0” is clearly visible

He compared this to a successful PolyBase query to Azure Storage account and found it was using TLS 1.2.

Azure Storage accounts can be configured to only allow a minimum TLS version. Our intrepid engineer checked the storage account and it was so old that it predated the time when this option was configurable for the storage account. But, in an effort to resolve the customer’s issue, he researched further. The customer was using a Version 7 Java Runtime Environment. Our engineer reproduced the error by downgrading his JRE to Version 7 and then querying a PolyBase external table pointing to his Azure storage account. Network tracing confirmed that JRE v7 will use TLS 1.0. He tried changing the TLS version in the Java configuration but it did not resolve the issue. He then switched back to JRE v8 and the issue was resolved in his environment. He asked the customer to upgrade to Version 8 and found the issue was resolved.

Further research showed that there were Azure TLS Certificate Changes requirements for some Azure endpoints and this old storage account was affected by these changes. TLS 1.0 was no longer sufficient and TLS 1.2 was now required. Switching to Java Runtime Environment Version 8 made PolyBase utilize TLS 1.2 when sending packets to Azure Storage Account and the problem was resolved.

Nathan Schoenack

Sr. Escalation Engineer