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Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. Its custom-built operating system (OS) bypass hardware interface enhances the performance of inter-instance communications, which is critical to scaling these applications. With EFA, High Performance Computing (HPC) applications using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Machine Learning (ML) applications using NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (NCCL) can scale to thousands of CPUs or GPUs. As a result, you get the application performance of on-premises HPC clusters with the on-demand elasticity and flexibility of the AWS cloud.

EFA is available as an optional EC2 networking feature that you can enable on any supported EC2 instance at no additional cost. Plus, it works with the most commonly used interfaces, APIs, and libraries for inter-node communications, so you can migrate your HPC applications to AWS with little or no modifications.

EFA Performance

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EFA provides a 4X improvement in scaling over ENA for a standard CFD simulation as shown in the chart above.

Solver for this benchmarking provided by Metacomp Technologies

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AWS Customer CFD Direct

AWS Customer CFD Direct maintains the popular OpenFOAM platform for Computational Fluid Dynamics and also produces CFD Direct From the Cloud (CFDDFC), an AWS Marketplace offering that makes it easy for you to run OpenFOAM on AWS. They have been testing and benchmarking EFA and recently shared their measurements in a blog post titled OpenFOAM HPC with AWS EFA. In the post, they report on a simulations of the external aerodynamics around a car. This simulation scales extra-linearly to over 200 cores, gradually declining to linear scaling at 1000 cores (about 100K simulation cells per core).

How it works

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Resources

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Now Available – Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for Tightly-Coupled HPC Workloads

April 29th, 2019
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AWS re:Invent 2018: Scaling HPC Applications on EC2 w/ Elastic Fabric Adapter

In this reInvent 2018 talk, we introduce Elastic Fabric Adapter and discuss how EFA enhances the inter-instance networking within Amazon EC2
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Deep Dive on OpenMPI and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)

In this tech talk, we'll do a deep dive into OpenMPI and its specific support for Amazon EC2's EFA, and show you how to get the most out of your code, and architect your solution for performance.
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Getting started with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)

In this tutorial, you create an EFA-enabled AMI and an EFA-enabled security group, and then launch EFA-enabled instances into a cluster placement group using that AMI and security group.