Posted On: Apr 29, 2019
Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), a low-latency network adapter for Amazon EC2 Instances, is now Generally Available for production use. EFA was first announced as a preview in November 2018.
EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run High Performance Computing (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.18xl and P3dn.24xl instances at no additional cost. EFA is currently available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and AWS GovCloud (US). Support for additional instances and regions will be added in the coming months.
Learn more about using EFA for your HPC workloads here.