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At AWS re:Invent 2022, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, explained high performance computing (HPC) workloads typically can either be compute-intensive, compute- and networking-intensive, or data- and memory-intensive in his keynote.
Compute workloads include weather forecasting, computational fluid dynamics, and financial options pricing. To help with this, you have Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances, which deliver up to 65 percent better price performance over comparable compute optimized x86-based instances.
Other HPC workloads require modeling the performance of complex structures—things like wind turbines, concrete buildings, and industrial equipment. Without enough data and memory, these models can take days or weeks to run in a cost-effective way. The Amazon EC2 Hpc6id instance is designed to deliver leading price performance for data and memory-intensive HPC workloads with higher memory bandwidth per core, faster local solid-state drive (SSD) storage, and enhanced networking with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).
Announcing Amazon EC2 Hpc7g Instances
Compute-intensive HPC workloads such as weather forecasting, computational fluid dynamics, and financial options pricing also require more network performance, even better price performance, and greater energy efficiency.
Today we are announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 Hpc7g instances, a new purpose-built instance type for tightly coupled compute and network-intensive HPC workloads.
Hpc7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton3E processors that provide up to two times better floating-point performance and 200 Gbps dedicated EFA bandwidth than EC2 C6gn instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and are up to 60 percent more energy efficient than comparable x86 instances.
Here’s a quick infographic that shows you how the Hpc7g instances and the Graviton3E processors compare to previous instances and processors:
Hpc7g instances feature sizes of up to 64 cores of the latest AWS custom Graviton3E CPUs with 128 GiB RAM. Here are the detailed specs:
| Instance Name | CPUs | RAM (GiB) | EFA Network Bandwidth (Gbps) | Attached Storage |
| hpc7g.4xlarge | 16 | 128 | Up to 200 | EBS Only |
| hpc7g.8xlarge | 32 | 128 | Up to 200 | EBS Only |
| hpc7g.16xlarge | 64 | 128 | Up to 200 | EBS Only |
Hpc7g instances are the most cost-efficient option to scale your HPC clusters on AWS. If you are considering migrating your largest HPC workloads requiring tens of thousands of cores at scale to AWS, you can take advantage of up to 200 Gbps EFA bandwidth to reduce the latency and run message passing interface (MPI) applications on parallel computing architectures while ensuring minimized power consumption on Hpc7g instances.
You can choose to use smaller sizes of Hpc7g instances to pick a lower number of cores and evenly distribute memory and network resources across the remaining cores to increase per-core performance to help reduce software licensing costs.
You can also use Hpc7g instances with AWS ParallelCluster to offer a complete HPC run-time environment that spans both x86 and arm64 instance types, giving you the flexibility to run different workload types within the same HPC cluster. You can compare and contrast performance, thus making it easier to find out what’s best for you and enabling easier porting of your workload.
Customer Story
The Water Institute is an independent, non-profit applied research organization that works across disciplines to advance science and develop integrated methods used to solve complex environmental and societal challenges.
They benchmarked the Hpc7g instances with 200 Gbps EFA using the Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) model. ADCIRC is deployed throughout many US government agencies to simulate the movement of water due to astronomic tides, riverine flows, and atmospheric forces, including hurricanes and it is often used for real-time forecasting applications and design studies.
The model run for this application is targeted at Southern Louisiana and is the basis for most of the analysis conducted there including levee design, planning studies, and real-time hurricane storm surge forecasting applications. The left graphic above shows the full extent of the domain, while to the right of that, the high-resolution area targeted at Southern Louisiana shows flooding around the levees in New Orleans during a simulation of Hurricane Katrina.
The model contains 1.6 million vertices and 3 million elements. It’s these parameters that affect the computational complexity of the simulations. The simulations depict 18 days of astronomic tide, river inflows, and atmospheric wind and pressure forcing.
The Water Institute benchmarked against many of the instance types that would be useful for their workload types at AWS, including c6gn.16xlarge, hpc7g.16xlarge, hpc6a.48xlarge, and hpc6id.36xlarge.
The Hpc7g instance shows more than 40 percent better performance than the C6gn instance and has comparable performance to other high performance x86 instance types but with a better price-to-performance ratio. With Hpc7g instances, the Water Institute can lower its costs while maintaining the performance levels they expect.
RIKEN, who has built the powerful supercomputer, FUGAKU using arm64, is collaborating with AWS to create a virtual Fugaku using Hpc7g with Graviton3E to support Japanese manufacturers’ increasing demand for compute power. RIKEN has already confirmed that multiple Fugaku applications provide excellent performance on the AWS Graviton3E processor in the AWS cloud environment.
Also, Siemens has optimized the scalability of Simcenter STAR-CCM+ across a broad range of CPU and GPU instances on AWS. This technology is supported on Linux and available through Arm-based EC2 instances or the Fugaku supercomputer.
To hear more voices of customers and partners such as Ansys, Arup, CERFACS, ESI, Jij, ParTec, Rescale, and TotalCAE, see the Hpc7g instances page.
Now Available
Amazon EC2 Hpc7g instances are now generally available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region for purchase in On-Demand, Reserved Instance, and Savings Plan form.
To learn more, see the Amazon EC2 Hpc7g instances page. Give it a try, and please send feedback to AWS re:Post for High Performance Compute or through your usual AWS support contacts.
– Channy
