Raghu Raja from Amazon gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin. “Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is the recently announced HPC networking offering from Amazon for EC2 instances. It allows applications such as MPI to communicate using the Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol that provides connectionless and unordered messaging services directly in userspace, bypassing both the operating system kernel and the Virtual Machine hypervisor. This talk presents the designs, capabilities, and an early performance characterization of the userspace and kernel components of the EFA software stack.”