AWS HPC Blog

Category: Media & Entertainment

Figure 2: CDI transmits the frame buffer using EFA. SRD is a multipath, self-healing transport. This creates a kernel bypass method that effectively enables a memory copy from one framebuffer to another.

How we enabled uncompressed live video with CDI over EFA

We’re going to take you into the world of broadcast video, and explain how it led to us announcing today the general availability of EFA on smaller instance sizes. For a range of applications, this is going to save customers a lot of money because they no longer need to use the biggest instances in each instance family to get HPC-style network performance. But the story of how we got there involves our Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), some difficult problems presented to us by customers in the entertainment industry, and an invention called the Cloud Digital Interface (CDI). And it started not very far from Hollywood.