Introducing Elastic Fabric Adapter
Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run HPC applications requiring high levels of inter-instance communications, like computational fluid dynamics, weather modeling, and reservoir simulation, at scale on AWS. It uses a custom-built operating system bypass technique to enhance the performance of inter-instance communications, which is critical to scaling HPC applications. With EFA, HPC applications using popular HPC technologies like Message Passing Interface (MPI) can scale to thousands of CPU cores. EFA supports industry-standard libfabric APIs, so applications that use a supported MPI library can be migrated to AWS with little or no modification.
EFA is available as an optional EC2 networking feature that you can enable on C5n.9xl, C5n.18xl, and P3dn.24xl instances. Additional instance types will be supported in the coming months.
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