Category: Compute

We have recently launched three new Amazon EC2 instances types enabled with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), our network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. These bring our EFA-enabled count to sixteen different instance families covering a wide range of use cases. EFA is going mainstream and we are just getting started.

Today we are announcing fair-share scheduling (FSS) for AWS Batch, which provides fine-grain control of the scheduling behavior by using a scheduling policy. With FSS, customers can prevent “unfair” situations caused by strict first-in, first-out scheduling where high priority jobs can’t “jump the queue” without draining other jobs first. You can now balance resource consumption between groups of workloads and have confidence that the shared compute environment is not dominated by a single workload. In this post, we’ll explain how fair-share scheduling works in more detail. You’ll also find a link to a step-by-step workshop at the end of this post, so you can try it out yourself.

Many shared file systems are used in supporting read-intensive applications, like financial backtesting. These applications typically exploit copies of datasets whose authoritative copy resides somewhere else. For small datasets, in-memory databases and caching techniques can yield impressive results. However, low latency flash-based scalable shared file systems can provide both massive IOPs and bandwidth. They’re also easy to adopt because of their use of a file-level abstraction. In this post, I’ll share how to easily create and scale a shared, distributed POSIX compatible file system that performs at local NVMe speeds for files opened read-only.

In this blog post, we’ll describe an ensemble run of 20K simulations to accelerate the drug discovery process, while also optimizing for run time and cost. We used two popular open-source packages — GROMACS, which does a molecular dynamics simulations, and pmx, a free-energy calculation package from the Computational Biomolecular Dynamics Group at Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Last year, we published the Genomics Secondary Analysis Using AWS Step Functions and AWS Batch solution as a companion solution to the Genomics Data Transfer, Analytics, and Machine Learning Using AWS Services whitepaper. Since then, many customers have used the secondary analysis solution to automate their bioinformatics pipelines in AWS. A common pain point expressed […]

This three-part series of posts cover the price performance characteristics of running GROMACS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) GPU instances. Part 1 covered some background no GROMACS and how it utilizes GPUs for acceleration. Part 2 covered the price performance of GROMACS on a particular GPU instance family running on a single instance. […]

This three-part series of posts cover the price performance characteristics of running GROMACS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) GPU instances. Part 1 covered some background no GROMACS and how it utilizes GPUs for acceleration. This post (Part 2) covers the price performance of GROMACS on a particular GPU instance family running on a […]

Comparing the performance of real applications across different Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types is the best way we’ve found for finding optimal configurations for HPC applications here at AWS. Previously, we wrote about price-performance optimizations for GROMACS that showed how the GROMACS molecular dynamics simulation runs on single instances, and how it […]

AWS Batch is a service that enables scientists and engineers to run computational workloads at virtually any scale without requiring them to manage a complex architecture. In this blog post, we share a set of best practices and practical guidance devised from our experience working with customers in running and optimizing their computational workloads. The readers will learn how to optimize their costs with Amazon EC2 Spot on AWS Batch, how to troubleshoot their architecture should an issue arise and how to tune their architecture and containers layout to run at scale.

The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) is responsible for running atmospheric, climate and ocean models covering the kingdom of Denmark. We worked together with the DMI to port and run a full numerical weather prediction (NWP) cycling dataflow with the Harmonie Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model to AWS. You can find a report of the porting and operational experience in the ACCORD community newsletter. In this blog post, we expand on that report to present the initial timing results from running the forecast component of Harmonie model on AWS. We also present these as-is timing results together with as-is timings attained on the supercomputing systems based on Cray XC40 and Intel Xeon based Cray XC50.