• Placement Groups Placement groups are groupings of EC2 instances which provide a consistent , lower latency than would be available if instance location was decided dynamically . Placement groups enable more efficient communication between nodes . Only certain types of instances are available for assignment to placement groups .
• Enhanced Networking Single root I / O virtualization ( SR-IOV ) enables more efficient communication from EC2 instances , and allow larger packet per second counts in network communication .
• GPU Instances AWS provides specialized instances that are attached to GPUs , providing high density core counts for parallel processing using CUDA or OpenCL .
• CloudFormation CloudFormation allows administrators and engineers to automate the process of setting up AWS resources , including networking , EC2 , and VPCs . CloudFormation has programmatic methods and strongly documented APIs that can be integrated with existing HPC workload schedulers to quickly create highly customized environments to execute workloads .
• CloudWatch CloudWatch provides a centralized service to monitor and respond to service outages and collect logs . CloudWatch is a key operational tool in a dynamic cloud environment that ensures application developers and engineers have a central repository for event and log information as services start and stop over time .
In addition to the native HPC capabilities that AWS delivers out of the box , the AWS Marketplace provides a variety of third-party technologies that are tested and certified to run on AWS .
These technologies can be deployed quickly and have simple elastic pricing models :
• Intel Lustre Lustre is a very common parallel filesystem in the HPC space . Intel provides a pre-packaged AMI with Lustre installed . These AMIs can be used to quickly deploy a fully-supported version of Lustre on AWS .
• FSMLabs TimeKeeper Many HPC workloads , specifically from the Financial Services industry , require highly accurate timestamps to operate and ensure data integrity . FSMLabs offers their TimeKeeper product in the AWS marketplace to assist admins in deploying highly accurate time synchronization .
• Univa Grid Engine Univa Grid Engine , a leading workload scheduler for HPC is available as a preloaded AMI on AWS . Univa provides AMIs for both a Head node and Compute node variants with cloud-based usage pricing .
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