Last week, we announced the Hpc7a instance type, the latest generation AMD-based HPC instance, purpose-built for tightly-coupled high performance computing workloads. This joins our family of HPC instance types in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) which began with Hpc7a’s predecessor — the Hpc6a in January 2022.

Amazon EC2 Hpc7a instances, powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC processors, deliver up to 2.5x better performance compared to Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances.

In this post, we’ll discuss details of the new instance and show you some of the performance metrics we’ve gathered by running HPC workloads like computational fluid dynamics (CFD), molecular dynamics (MD) and numerical weather prediction (NWP).

Introducing the Hpc7a instance

We launched Hpc6a last year for customers to efficiently run their compute-bound HPC workloads on AWS. As their jobs grow in complexity, customers have asked for more cores with more compute performance, as well as more memory and network performance to reduce their time to results. The Hpc7a instances deliver on these asks, providing twice the number of cores, 1.5x the number of memory channels, and three-times the network bandwidth compared to the previous generation.

It’s based on the 4th Generation AMD EPYC (code name Genoa) processor with up to 192 physical cores, an all-core turbo frequency of 3.7 GHz, 768 GiB of memory, and 300 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) network performance. This is all possible because of the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and a lightweight hypervisor that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware, result in performance that’s virtually indistinguishable from bare metal.

Read the full blog

Reminder: You can learn a lot from AWS HPC engineers by subscribing to the HPC Tech Short YouTube channel, and following the AWS HPC Blog channel.