Amazon Web Services was the first major cloud provider to offer services tailored to the unique needs of the High Performance Computing ( HPC ) community .
This provided AWS an early set of adopters that supplied feedback and enabled Amazon to continually expand their capabilities to support a wider range of HPC workloads . Today , AWS has specialized capabilities through its platform features , case studies and marketplace partners to enable a range of specialized HPC workloads :
• 3D Rendering & Special Effects As more consumer entertainment utilizes special effects , HPC has become a common tool for video rendering and introducing digital elements not easily filmed which can be more vivid through graphic arts .
• EDA Electronic Design Automation , is a common HPC application used to simulate performance and failures within silicon chips during the design phase . Many application vendors , including Cadence and Synopsys , provide highly scalable tools to parallelly execute across systems for designing and analyzing complex circuits and chips .
• Genomics While some Genomics workloads fit into the Big Data space more than HPC , the Genomics space continues to leverage complex HPC
platforms . Many Genomics firms today have a combination of Big Data and HPC technologies integrated into a single analysis pipeline .
• CFD Computational Fluid Dynamics is an early workload on HPC that has continued to gain momentum in the industrial field as product design has become more virtual . These workloads are mathematically intensive .
• Risk Modeling & Back Testing Specific to the Financial Services domain , many firms will continually analyze the exposure of the organization against current and future trades taking place . New models are tested against past data sets to see how changes would potentially impact the market and the organization ’ s positions .
As part of AWS ’ s investment in HPC capabilities , there are a variety of technologies available to accelerate performance , simplify configuration and automate monitoring for HPC workloads on AWS :
• CfnCluster A series of scripts that leverage CloudFormation for the rapid setup and configuration of HPC clusters in AWS . CfnCluster enables administrators to automate the deployment of compute resources for HPC workloads as well as ensure that the proper environment and libraries are in place to support application execution .
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