Amazon Web Services Inc. Monday announced the availability of a new series of high-performance computing workloads on its cloud that provide what it claims is far superior price performance.

The “purpose-built” Hpc6a instances, powered by 3rd Gen EPYC central processing units developed by Advanced Micro Devices Inc., make it possible to process HPC workloads with up to 65% better price-performance compared to similar “compute optimized” instances, Amazon said.

In its pitch, Amazon said HPC is helping in solving complex academic, scientific and business problems. However, the company notes it can be expensive because of the need for fast data processing, memory and storage resources, in addition to the requirement for low-latency connectivity when working with multicluster environments.

So Amazon is offering the Hpc6a instances as a more affordable, cloud-based alternative. It’s also a good option for companies that would otherwise invest in expensive, on-premises installations to meet the performance demands of HPC, it said.

The new 3.6 gigahertz AMD processors deliver up to 384 gigabytes of memory with 100 gigabytes per second of Elastic Fabric Adapter networking, meaning they can support cost-effective, scalable HPC cluster deployment. Amazon said they can scale to tens of thousands of cores, and that they should appeal to customers working in areas such as computational fluid dynamics, genomics, molecular dynamics, weather forecasting, financial risk modeling, seismic imaging and computer-aided engineering, for example.

The company added that Hpc6a instance deployments can be very flexible, managed by AWS ParallelCluster, a cluster management service. It means they can be deployed alongside other types of instances within the same cluster, Amazon explained.

In addition, the Hpc6a instances benefit from Amazon’s Nitro System, which is a collection of building blocks that offload traditional virtualization functions to dedicated resources, reducing overheads and ensuring higher performance, availability and a security boost for good measure.

Amazon said the Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances are available as On-Demand Instances, Reserve Instances or through AWS Savings Plans. They’re available now in the US East (Ohio) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions, with additional regions to offer them soon.

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