Why Amazon EC2 F1 Instances?
Amazon EC2 F1 instances use FPGAs to enable delivery of custom hardware accelerations. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and supporting hardware level development on the cloud. 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. Examples of target applications that can benefit from F1 instance acceleration are genomics, search/analytics, image and video processing, network security, electronic design automation (EDA), image and file compression and big data analytics.
F1 instances provide diverse development environments: from low-level hardware developers to software developers who are more comfortable with C/C++ and openCL environments (available on our GitHub). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times as you like, and across as many F1 instances as you like. There is no software charge for the development tools when using the FPGA developer AMI and you can program the FPGAs on your F1 instance as many times as you like with no additional fees.
Amazon EC2 F1 Instances with Customizable FPGAs for Hardware Acceleration
Benefits
Use cases
Features
Customer and Partner testimonials
Here are some examples of how customers and partners have achieved their business goals with Amazon EC2 F1 instances.
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Munich Leukemia Lab
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Bigstream
Bigstream is an automated acceleration technology for Apache Spark. It includes a compiler and runtime that routes execution of Spark application tasks onto Amazon F1 FPGA instances requiring zero user code change. Users experience up to a 10x improvement in performance. In addition to single node operation, Bigstream also supports clustering of F1 instances. Bigstream is available in public preview at no cost as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) F1 instances of all sizes.
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Merlin™ Compiler
Merlin™ Compiler brings the power of FPGA acceleration to application developers with a simple software programming model and no hardware knowledge required. It provides an automated compilation flow from C/C++ to highly-optimized FPGA accelerators. It enables significant gains in productivity while maintaining performance comparable to manual optimization.
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Illumina
The Illumina DRAGEN Bio-IT Platform provides accurate, ultra-rapid secondary genome analysis of sequencing data. It enables labs of all sizes and disciplines to do more with their genomic data. The DRAGEN Platform uses FPGA-based Amazon EC2 F1 instances to provide hardware-accelerated implementations of genomic analysis algorithms, such as BCL conversion, mapping, alignment, sorting, duplicate marking, and haplotype variant calling. Secondary analysis of a human genome with DRAGEN takes less than 20 minutes on Amazon EC2 F1 instances which is 30x faster than without acceleration. Dragen on AWS is available here or through Illumina BaseSpace sequencing hub.
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InAccel
InAccel FPGA-Accelerated ML (AML) Suite provides a set of accelerators that run on Amazon EC2 F1 instances for ML applications. Applications developed using popular frameworks such as Apache Spark, Scikit-learn, and Keras can be accelerated using InAccel FPGA-Accelerated ML Suite. It is shipped as a fully integrated AMI that can be used to accelerate deep learning and machine learning algorithms for classification and clustering. InAccel's novel "FPGA Resource Manager" Docker container handles all the available FPGA resources allowing developers to seamlessly scale their containerized workloads to multiple F1 instances.
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rENIAC
rENIAC is a fully managed, highly available Cassandra accelerator enabled by Amazon EC2 F1 instances that stores multiple TBs of hot data to deliver up to a 10x performance improvement, 10x density increase and 15x latency reduction over Cassandra alone. rENIAC leverages SSDs to cache data, tightly coupled with FPGA-based acceleration to access and serve TBs of data with in-memory-like performance. rENIAC is also compatible with DataStax clusters.
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Socionext
Socionext, a leading provider of video processing and distribution products, possesses decades of hardware-based solution expertise essential for the development of a powerful and innovative FPGA-based virtual server platform. By working together with AWS, Socionext offers a hardware-accelerated, cloud-based encoding solution on Amazon EC2 F1 instances that ensures consistent, high-quality video streams while significantly reducing processing time and delivery costs.
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Trend Micro
Trend Micro provides automated, flexible and all-in-one security for AWS customers via the Trend Micro Cloud One platform. Trend Micro, an advanced technology partner, leverages Amazon EC2 F1 instances to enable our joint customers to maximize compute efficiency and performance to inspect network traffic, allowing customers to quickly and efficiently deploy broad, scalable network layer security on AWS.
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Valtix
Product Details
Name | FPGAs |
vCPUs | Instance Memory (GiB) | SSD Storage (GB) | Enhanced Networking | EBS Optimized | On-Demand Price/hr* | 1-yr Reserved Instance Effective Hourly* | 3-yr Reserved Instance Effective Hourly* |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
f1.2xlarge | 1 |
8 | 122 | 470 |
Yes | Yes | $1.65 | $1.06 | $0.76 |
f1.4xlarge | 2 | 16 | 244 |
940 |
Yes | Yes | $3.30 | $2.12 | $1.52 |
f1.16xlarge | 8 |
64 | 976 |
4 x 940 |
Yes | Yes | $13.20 | $8.50 | $6.10 |
*Prices shown are for Linux/Unix in the US East (Northern Virginia) AWS Region and rounded to the nearest cent. Prices for 1-year and 3-year reserved instances are for "Partial Upfront" payment options. For full pricing details, see the Amazon EC2 pricing page.