Amazon Releases Second-Generation FPGA-Powered EC2 Instances
Seattle, Thursday, 12 December 2024.
Amazon’s new EC2 instances offer up to 192 vCPUs and 8 FPGAs, significantly enhancing performance for tasks like genomics and big data, outpacing CPUs by up to 95 times.
Technical Specifications and Performance Leap
The newly released F2 instances, announced on December 10, 2024, represent a significant advancement in cloud computing capabilities. Each instance can be equipped with up to eight AMD Virtex UltraScale+ HBM VU47P FPGAs, featuring 2.85 million system logic cells and achieving up to 28 TOPS of DSP compute performance for INT8 values [1]. The instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC (Milan) processors, offering up to 192 vCPUs and 2 TiB of system memory [2]. Compared to their predecessors, the F1 instances, these new offerings deliver up to 60% better price performance [2][3].
Enhanced Memory and Network Capabilities
The F2 instances introduce substantial improvements in memory and networking capabilities. Each FPGA comes with 16 GiB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and 64 GiB of DDR4 memory [1]. The largest instance type, f2.48xlarge, provides 7.6 TiB of NVMe SSD storage and impressive network bandwidth of up to 100 Gbps [1][2]. For applications requiring low latency, the f2.48xlarge supports AWS Cloud Digital Interface (CDI) with instance-to-instance latency as low as 8 milliseconds [1].
Real-World Applications and Use Cases
These instances are particularly well-suited for compute-intensive applications across various sectors. In the healthcare sector, AstraZeneca has demonstrated the potential of FPGA acceleration by using similar instances to process over 400,000 whole genome samples in under two months [1]. The F2 instances are designed to accelerate tasks in genomics, multimedia processing, big data analytics, and network security [2]. Users can leverage preconfigured FPGA building blocks and advanced cloud-based tools for development, with the ability to register their FPGA designs as Amazon FPGA Images (AFIs) for easy deployment [2].
Availability and Deployment Options
Currently, F2 instances are available in US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (London) regions [1]. The instances support multiple purchasing options, including On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plan, Dedicated Instance, and Dedicated Host forms [1]. It’s worth noting that these instances are Linux-only [1], and users can access the AWS FPGA Development Kit through GitHub, which includes comprehensive documentation and development tools [2].