Explore the key design choices for maximizing HPC cluster performance on AWS. Learn why launching within a single Availability Zone, selecting EC2 instances with EFA, and replacing EFS with FSx for Lustre can significantly enhance your HPC workloads.
Table of Contents
Question
A company has built a high performance computing (HPC) cluster in AWS for a tightly coupled workload that generates a large number of shared files stored in Amazon EFS. The cluster was performing well when the number of Amazon EC2 instances in the cluster was 100. However, when the company increased the cluster size to 1.000 EC2 instances, overall performance was well below expectations.
Which collection of design choices should a solutions architect make to achieve the maximum performance from the HPC cluster? (Choose three.)
A. Ensure the HPC cluster is launched within a single Availability Zone.
B. Launch the EC2 instances and attach elastic network interfaces in multiples of four.
C. Select EC2 instance types with an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) enabled.
D. Ensure the cluster is launched across multiple Availability Zones.
E. Replace Amazon EFS with multiple Amazon EBS volumes in a RAID array.
F. Replace Amazon EFS with Amazon FSx for Lustre.
Answer
A. Ensure the HPC cluster is launched within a single Availability Zone.
C. Select EC2 instance types with an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) enabled.
F. Replace Amazon EFS with Amazon FSx for Lustre.
Explanation
To achieve maximum performance from the HPC cluster, the solutions architect should make the following design choices:
- Ensure the HPC cluster is launched within a single Availability Zone (Option A): This is because network latency can impact the performance of tightly coupled workloads. Keeping all instances in a single Availability Zone reduces network latency.
- Select EC2 instance types with an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) enabled (Option C): EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. Its OS-bypass feature enables low-latency, high-bandwidth networking which is beneficial for tightly coupled HPC workloads.
- Replace Amazon EFS with Amazon FSx for Lustre (Option F): Amazon FSx for Lustre is designed for applications that require fast storage where speed matters most, such as machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), video processing, and financial modeling. It provides sub-millisecond latencies, up to hundreds of GBps of throughput, and millions of IOPS. For workloads that are read-heavy, write-heavy, or have a mix of read and write operations, Amazon FSx provides the high-speed access needed to compute results quickly.
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