Attaching Kubernetes clusters with NVIDIA V100 GPUs to Azure Machine Learning Service

Azure Machine Learning Service allows you to easily deploy compute for training and inference via a machine learning workspace. Although one of the compute types is Kubernetes, the workspace is a bit picky about the node VM sizes. I wanted to use two Standard_NC6s_v3 instances with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs but that was not allowed. Other GPU instances, such as the Standard_NC6 type (K80 GPU) can be deployed from the workspace.

Luckily, you can deploy clusters on your own and then attach the cluster to your Azure Machine Learning workspace. You can create the cluster with the below command. Make sure you ask for a quota increase that allows 12 cores of Standard_NC6s_v3.

az aks create -g RESOURCE_GROUP --generate-ssh-keys --node-vm-size Standard_NC6s_v3 --node-count 2 --disable-rbac --name NAME --admin-username azureuser --kubernetes-version 1.11.5

Before I ran the above command, I created an Azure Machine Learning workspace to a resource group called ml-rg. The above command was run with RESOURCE_GROUP set to ml-rg and NAME set to mlkub. After a few minutes, you should have your cluster up and running. Be mindful of the price of this cluster. GPU instances are not cheap!

Now we can Add Compute to the workspace. In your workspace, navigate to Compute and use the + Add Compute button. Complete the form as below. The compute name does not need to match the cluster name.

After a while, the Kubernetes cluster should be attached:

Note that detaching a cluster does not remove it. Be sure to remove the cluster manually!

You can now deploy container images to the cluster that take advantage of the GPU of each node. When you a deploy an image marked as a GPU image, Azure Machine Learning takes care of all the parameters that allow your container to use the GPU on the Kubernetes node.

The screenshot below shows a deployment of an image that can be used for inference. It uses an ONNX ResNet50v2 model.

With the below picture of a cat, the model used by the container guesses it is an Egyptian Cat (it’s not but it is close) with close to 94% certainty.

Using your own compute with the Azure Machine Learning service is very easy to do. The more interesting and somewhat more complicated parts such as the creation of the inference container that supports GPUs is something I will discuss in a later post. In a follow-up post, I will also discuss how you send image data to the scoring container.