A company has data lakes designed for high performance computing (HPC) workloads. Which Amazon EC2 instance type should the company use to meet these…

High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads involve complex calculations and are fundamentally compute-bound, requiring significant processing power. Amazon EC2 Compute Optimized instances are specifically engineered to deliver the highest performance at the lowest cost for compute-intensive applications. They feature high-performance processors and are ideal for workloads like batch processing, media transcoding, scientific modeling, and HPC. The data lake context implies large-scale data processing, which, when combined with HPC, points directly to a need for powerful CPUs to run simulations or complex analyses on that data.

A. General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory, and networking. They are not specialized for the high CPU demands characteristic of HPC workloads.

C. Memory optimized instances are designed for applications that process large datasets in memory, such as in-memory databases, which is not the primary requirement for HPC.

D. Storage optimized instances are for workloads requiring high, sequential read/write access to large datasets on local storage, focusing on I/O performance rather than computational power.

1. Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). Amazon EC2 Instance Types. AWS Documentation. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/.

Reference Details: Under the "Compute optimized" section

the documentation states

"Compute Optimized instances are ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors... including... high performance computing (HPC)."

2. Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). What is High Performance Computing (HPC)?. AWS Cloud Computing. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/.

Reference Details: The "How HPC on AWS works" section describes using "compute-optimized instances" as a core component for running HPC workloads

highlighting their suitability for computationally intensive tasks.

3. Amazon Web Services. (2023

November). Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances. PDF.

Reference Details: In the "Instance types" chapter

the section "Compute optimized instances" (p. 101) explicitly lists "High performance computing (HPC)" as a primary use case for this instance family.