Posted On: Sep 25, 2018
Starting today, Amazon EC2 F1 instances are available with a new instance size, f1.4xlarge. The new f1.4xlarge size has two Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGAs in order to provide a new price/performance option between existing instance sizes f1.2xlarge which has a single FPGA and f1.16xlarge which has eight FPGAs.
Amazon EC2 F1 instances use FPGAs to enable custom hardware acceleration in the cloud. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your custom hardware acceleration logic.
Using F1 instances to deploy hardware accelerations can be useful in many applications to solve complex science, engineering, and business problems that require high bandwidth, enhanced networking, and very high compute capabilities. Example use cases include image and video processing, genomic sequencing, compression, security algorithms, and search/analytics. F1 instances are particularly beneficial for applications that are time sensitive such as clinical genomics, real time video processing, and financial risk analysis.
Customers can launch f1.4xlarge instances using the AWS console, Amazon EC2 command line interface, AWS SDKs and third-party libraries. New f1.4xl instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) AWS regions. Customers can purchase these instances as On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts. For more information, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/.