Amazon today announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc8a instances, a new high performance computing-optimized instance type powered by the latest 5th Generation AMD EPYC processors with a maximum frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, AWS said.
These instances are designed for compute-intensive, tightly coupled HPC workloads, including computational fluid dynamics, simulations for faster design iterations, high-resolution weather modeling within tight operational windows, and complex crash simulations that require rapid time-to-results.
The new Hpc8a instances deliver up to 40% higher performance, 42% greater memory bandwidth, and up to 25% better price-performance compared to previous generation Hpc7a instances. Customers benefit from the high core density, memory bandwidth, and low-latency networking that helped them scale efficiently and reduce job completion times for their compute-intensive simulation workloads.
Hpc8a instances are available with 192 cores, 768 GiB memory, and 300 Gbps Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking to run applications requiring high levels of inter node communications at scale.
Hpc8a instances are available in a single 96xlarge size with a 1:4 core-to-memory ratio. Users can right-size for HPC workload requirements by customizing the number of cores needed at launch instances. These instances also use sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards, which offload CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software, enhancing performance and security for your workloads.
Hpc8a instances can be used with AWS ParallelCluster and AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS) to simplify workload submission and cluster creation and Amazon FSx for Lustre for sub-millisecond latencies and up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput for storage. To achieve the best performance for HPC workloads, these instances have Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) disabled.
Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances are now available in US East (Ohio) and Europe (Stockholm) AWS Region. For regional availability and a future roadmap, search the instance type in the CloudFormation resources tab of AWS Capabilities by Region.
To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page.
