Amazon EC2 Hpc6a Instances

HPC instances powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors

Why Amazon EC2 Hpc6a Instances?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc6a instances feature 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and are designed for tightly coupled, compute-intensive high performance computing (HPC) workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), weather forecasting, and multiphysics simulations. Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), powered by the AWS Nitro System, is enabled to provide low-latency 100 Gbps network bandwidth for internode communication. 

Benefits

Hpc6a instances are purpose-built to cost-effectively run HPC workloads on AWS. To help you reduce the cost of running your HPC workloads, Hpc6a instances are priced up to 70% less than similar compute-optimized, x86 based instances.

With 100 Gbps EFA networking, you have access to a high-throughput, low-latency, low-jitter channel for tightly coupled workloads. EFA networking helps you scale faster and reduce time-to-insight for your HPC workloads.

With AWS ParallelCluster, you can provision Hpc6a instances alongside other instance types within the same cluster. This gives you the flexibility to run different workloads optimized for different instances within your cluster.

Hpc6a instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor that delivers practically all the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security.

Features

Hpc6a instances are powered by two 48-core 3rd Gen AMD EPYC 7003 series processors built on 7 nm process nodes for increased efficiency, and 384 GiB of memory, with a total of 96 cores (4 GiB of memory per core). This allows you to run the most demanding HPC workloads while taking advantage of the price performance offered by AMD.

Latest-generation Nitro Cards and EFA deliver 100 Gbps of network throughput to interconnected nodes. You can also use Amazon FSx for Lustre for sub-millisecond latencies, and up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput for storage.

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.

Product details

Hpc6a instances feature 3rd Gen AMD EPYC 7003 series processors with up to 3.6 GHz all-core turbo frequency built on a 7 nm process node for increased efficiency.

Instance Size

Physical Cores

Memory (GiB)

EFA Network Bandwidth (Gbps)

Network Bandwidth (Gbps)*

hpc6a.48xlarge

96

384

100

25

 

*500 Mbps network bandwidth outside of the virtual private cloud (VPC) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Customer testimonials

Here are some examples of how customers and partners have achieved their business agility, price performance, cost savings, and sustainability goals with Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances.

  • Wisk Aero

    Using AWS, we quickly scaled and added the needed on-demand compute power for the CFD team, compared with the months required and significant capital to build and scale an on-premises HPC cluster.

    Colin Haubrich, Head of IT at Wisk Aero
  • Blue Origin

    AWS has been a long-time partner supporting our business in many ways. The recent HPC solution has provided a step-change improvement in both speed and cost for some of Blue Origin’s more expensive computational workloads. Not only did they advance the AWS infrastructure, they also provided a top-notch team to help Blue Origin implement the change to realize cost savings and speed up.

    John Paris, Senior Propulsion Engineer at Blue Origin
  • TotalCAE

    TotalCAE Platform makes it easy for computer-aided engineering (CAE) departments to adopt the agility and flexibility of AWS in just a few clicks for hundreds of engineering applications like Ansys Fluent, Siemens Simcenter STAR-CCM+, and Dassault Systemes Abaqus. As an AWS HPC competency partner, we help customers run their CAE workloads in the cloud. With Hpc6a instances, we have seen up to a 30% performance boost for CFD workloads at a lower cost, enabling TotalCAE to offer customers industry leading price performance, and scalability in the cloud.

    Rod Mach, President at TotalCAE
  • Maxar Technologies

    The release of the Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instance is yet another exciting announcement from AWS that enables Maxar to continue to meet and exceed our customer requirements for Big Compute workflows—whether to accelerate the research and operations of numerical weather prediction (NWP) workloads or to create the world’s best, most up-to-date, and accurate digital twin models with our Maxar Precision3D product suite. The Hpc6a instances, featuring AMD EPYC 3rd Gen processors, combined with the EFA networking capability provides us a 60% performance improvement over alternatives, while also being more cost efficient. This enables Maxar to strategically choose among the suite of AWS HPC cluster configurations that we've developed to best suit our clients' needs while maximizing flexibility and resiliency.

    Dan Nord, SVP and Chief Product Officer at Maxar Technologies
  • Rescale

    Hpc6a instances combine the leading-edge interconnect technology of EFA with the extremely versatile AMD EPYC 3rd Gen chipset, providing a performance sweet spot for applications ranging from CFDs, which relies on scalable hardware, to structural finite element analysis, which benefits from the high memory performance of AMD 3rd Gen EPYC processors. Rescale’s customers solve some of today’s most critical challenges in areas ranging from autonomous vehicles to climate to drug discovery using HPC. With Hpc6a instances, we’re excited to give customers another powerful tool for accelerating innovation and scientific progress.

    Mulyanto Poort, VP of High Performance Computing at Rescale
  • DTN

    Our collaboration with AWS allows us to better serve our customers with high-resolution weather prediction systems that feed analytics engines. We’re very excited to see the price/performance of Hpc6a instances, and we expect this to be our go-to Amazon EC2 instance choice for HPC workloads going forward.

    Lars Ewe, Chief Technology Officer at DTN
  • Commonwealth Fusion Systems

    CFS has benefited greatly from HPC. The new Amazon EC2 Hpc6a has been a game changer in many respects. We’ve been able to increase the speed of many simulation tasks, cut runtimes approximately in half, and reduce our computing costs by over 50%. As CFS works to bring clean, limitless commercial fusion energy to the grid, we’re excited to work with AWS and their HPC team.

    Nate O'Farrell, Head of IT Infrastructure at Commonwealth Fusion Systems
  • Metro Weather

    With Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances, Metro Weather is able to achieve up to a 43% performance improvement over C5n instances for its wind forecasting workloads. Additionally, this performance boost over C5n instances required 50% less compute instances and reduced compute costs by as much as 75%. Hpc6a’s impressive price/performance benefits make it an ideal choice to power Metro Weather’s wind forecasting HPC platform.

    Jun-ichi Furumoto, CEO at Metro Weather Co. Ltd.