January 2024

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the launch of AWS Marketplace in the AWS Secret Region, an expansion of the AWS Marketplace for the U.S. Intelligence Community (ICMP) program. First deployed in 2016, the AWS Marketplace for ICMP is a digital catalog with software listings from independent software vendors (ISVs) that makes it easier for customers in the intelligence community to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS.

With this announcement, government customers now have access to 30 ISVs and 170 products in the AWS Secret Region, an air-gapped cloud accredited to support workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. AWS scans, tests, and verifies that all products work in the AWS Secret Region before listing them in ICMP. For classified deployments, all ICMP ISVs must be vetted for foreign ownership control and influence (FOCI) by the government prior to beginning contract performance.

AWS ParallelCluster version 3.8.0 is now generally available in AWS Secret Region. A key feature in this release is updated cluster scaling strategies to help you meet your scaling and cost requirements, ranging from strict all-or-nothing, that avoid launching idle instances, to best-effort, which prioritizes throughput scaling over avoiding idle instances. Other important features in this release include:

1. Support for mounting user-defined file systems in AWS to the /home directory of the head node, helping you simplify cluster storage management.
2. Custom Munge key to help you simplify integration of additional cluster resources that require the Scheduler Munge key.

AWS ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications. To learn more about launching HPC clusters on AWS, visit the AWS ParallelCluster User Guide.