Pre-hardened Ubuntu 22.04 HPC & AI Edition

Pre-hardened Ubuntu 22.04 HPC & AI Edition on Azure

A GPU- and fabric-ready Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS HPC & AI Edition, built and hardened for the Azure Marketplace and tuned for accelerated computing. It targets Azure’s GPU (NC, ND, NV) and HPC (HB, HC) VM families: staged for NVIDIA CUDA and GPU drivers and for the RDMA / InfiniBand fabric those SKUs expose, so a training run or MPI job starts without the usual day of driver-and-fabric assembly. Certified to Microsoft Marketplace standards.

Who this is for: ML and AI engineers running training and inference on GPU VMs, HPC and research teams running tightly-coupled MPI over InfiniBand, and ISVs delivering GPU-accelerated or scientific products who want a hardened, driver-ready 22.04 base instead of building the CUDA and fabric stack by hand.

Target industries & use cases: AI/ML (training, fine-tuning, batch inference), scientific and engineering simulation (CFD, FEA, molecular dynamics, weather), financial Monte Carlo, genomics, and rendering — any workload that needs GPUs, an RDMA/InfiniBand-class interconnect, or both.

Value proposition: Standing up a working GPU/HPC 22.04 host means matching the driver to the SKU, installing CUDA, wiring up the fabric, configuring the Azure Linux Agent and Trusted Launch, applying kernel CVEs, and validating against Microsoft certification. This image does that groundwork for you:

• CUDA / NVIDIA driver-ready — staged for NVIDIA drivers and the CUDA toolkit on Azure NC/ND/NV families, so accelerated frameworks come up without manual driver-matching
• RDMA / InfiniBand fabric-ready — prepared for the low-latency interconnect on HB/HC/ND SKUs for tightly-coupled MPI and multi-node training
• Monthly patch cadence — each version is rebuilt from upstream Ubuntu 22.04 security updates within days of release
• 33 documented hardening traps applied — every version is gated through an automated trap-audit covering Trusted Launch, sysprep races, Defender pre-installation, hardening-script residue, and 29 more
• Trusted Launch + Secure Boot enabled by default — Gen2 image with vTPM and signed-boot per Microsoft’s OEM requirements; Azure Linux Agent (walinuxagent.service) pre-installed and running

How this differs from rolling your own: The hard part of GPU/HPC on a stock image is never the OS — it is matching the driver to the SKU, getting CUDA and the fabric to agree, and keeping that stack patched without breaking it. Doing that by hand on each node is the toil this edition removes, with the Azure hardening (serial console locked down, root SSH disabled, audit logging) intact. Aligned with our general-purpose and compute-tuned 22.04 images for one fleet playbook.

Recommended deployment: GPU — Standard_NC24ads_A100_v4 or ND-series for training, NV-series for visualization/inference. HPC — HB/HC-series with InfiniBand; deploy into a single proximity placement group and enable accelerated networking. Premium SSD v2 or Azure Managed Lustre for scratch and datasets. SSH key authentication required.

Azure integration: Azure Linux Agent, Trusted Launch + Secure Boot, NVIDIA GPU Driver extension, InfiniBand/RDMA networking, Azure Batch, CycleCloud, and Azure Monitor Agent all attach via standard extensions with no compatibility shims.

Support: support@dcassociatesgroup.com · www.dcassociatesgroup.com/support — 24-hour initial response SLA.

Documentation: www.dcassociatesgroup.com/docs/ubuntu-2204-hpc-ai-on-azure — deployment guide, hardening reference, monthly changelog.