CFD Direct is pleased to announce the release of version 10 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®). CFDDFC v10 is available as a pay-as-you-go image for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. It is available as:
- “Standard” CFDDFC, for instances running processors with x86 architecture from Intel and AMD ;
- CFDDFC (Arm), for instances with AWS Graviton processors with Arm architecture.
“Standard” CFDDFC
CFDDFC is the marketplace product for the instance types based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD. Their latest generation of compute instances are C6i and C6a, respectively, with the largest instance types, c6i.32xlarge and c6a.48xlarge, providing 64 and 96 physical cores in a single instance.
CFDDFC provides a full desktop environment with graphical applications, accessible using the X2Go remote desktop (see below), including:
- OpenFOAM v10 released by the OpenFOAM Foundation, produced and maintained by CFD Direct;
- ParaView v5.6.0 for data visualization;
- OpenMPI v4.1.4 with support for Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for HPC workloads;
- FreeCAD v0.19.2 parametric 3D CAD modeler;
- … running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS GNU/Linux operating system.
CFDDFC (Arm)
CFDDFC (Arm) is the marketplace product for instances using processors with Arm architecture, including the C7g and C6g instances with the Graviton processor. CFDDFC (Arm) is a server-only distribution without remote desktop and graphical applications. CFDDFC (Arm) includes:
- OpenFOAM v10 released by the OpenFOAM Foundation;
- OpenMPI v4.1.4 with support for Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for HPC workloads;
- … running on Ubuntu Server for Arm 20.04 LTS GNU/Linux operating system.
Instance Types
EC2 includes Compute Optimized instances for compute-intensive workloads. The latest generation of instances, C6i, C6a and C7g, provide the best performance available today. They support Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) as standard which provides high throughput, low latency networking required for running a cluster of instances effectively. They also support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), an additional network interface for cluster HPC applications running on the largest instance type in the family.
The previous generation of instances, C5 and C6g, have special ‘n’-variants of the instance types, C5n and C6gn, which include ENA and EFA. C5n was the first instance type including ENA which demonstrated 70%-90% scaling at 504 cores, compared to scaling below 50% for the standard C5 instances. With EFA they also showed ~70% scaling at 1008 cores for meshes of 100 k cells per core and linear scaling at 1008 cores for a fixed mesh size of 97 m cells.
As the number of instance types increases, the choice can overwhelm users of CFDDFC. Many instances are also only available in certain AWS regions, but become available later in other regions. To help keep up to date with availability, we have added more information to the -instance list option when users launch an instance using the CFDDFC command line interface. When the following command is run, it outputs the list of instance types and their availability in different AWS regions.
cfddfc launch -instance list
**At the time of writing (28 July 2022)**, it outputs the following:
The available instance types are listed below according to the number of physical cores, '#C':
#C : Instances
1 : c6i.large c6a.large c6gn.medium c6g.medium c7g.medium c5n.large c5a.large c5.large
m6i.large m6a.large m6g.medium m5zn.large m5n.large m5.large t4g.micro t2.micro
2 : c6i.xlarge c6a.xlarge c6gn.large c6g.large c7g.large c5n.xlarge c5a.xlarge c5.xlarge
m6i.xlarge m6a.xlarge m6g.large m5zn.xlarge m5n.xlarge m5.xlarge
4 : c6i.2xlarge c6a.2xlarge c6gn.xlarge c6g.xlarge c7g.xlarge c5n.2xlarge c5a.2xlarge c5.2xlarge
m6i.2xlarge m6a.2xlarge m6g.xlarge m5zn.2xlarge m5n.2xlarge m5.2xlarge
6 : m5zn.3xlarge
8 : c6i.4xlarge c6a.4xlarge c6gn.2xlarge c6g.2xlarge c7g.2xlarge c5n.4xlarge c5a.4xlarge c5.4xlarge
m6i.4xlarge m6a.4xlarge m6g.2xlarge m5n.4xlarge m5.4xlarge
12 : m5zn.6xlarge
16 : c6i.8xlarge c6a.8xlarge c6gn.4xlarge c6g.4xlarge c7g.4xlarge c5a.8xlarge
m6i.8xlarge m6a.8xlarge m6g.4xlarge m5n.8xlarge
18 : c5n.9xlarge c5.9xlarge m5.8xlarge
24 : c6i.12xlarge c6a.12xlarge c5a.12xlarge c5.12xlarge
m6i.12xlarge m6a.12xlarge m5zn.12xlarge m5n.12xlarge m5.12xlarge
32 : c6i.16xlarge c6a.16xlarge c6gn.8xlarge c6g.8xlarge c7g.8xlarge c5a.16xlarge
m6i.16xlarge m6a.16xlarge m6g.8xlarge m5n.16xlarge m5.16xlarge
36 : c5n.18xlarge c5.18xlarge
48 : c6i.24xlarge c6a.24xlarge c6gn.12xlarge c6g.12xlarge c7g.12xlarge c5a.24xlarge c5.24xlarge
m6i.24xlarge m6a.24xlarge m6g.12xlarge m5n.24xlarge m5.24xlarge
64 : c6i.32xlarge c6a.32xlarge c6gn.16xlarge c6g.16xlarge c7g.16xlarge
m6i.32xlarge m6a.32xlarge m6g.16xlarge
96 : c6a.48xlarge m6a.48xlarge hpc6a.48xlarge
The table below shows the availability of instance families in different regions:
Region c5 c5a c5n c6a c6g c6gn c6i c7g hpc6a m5 m5n m5zn m6a m6g m6i
us-west-2 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
us-west-1 X X X X X X X X X X
us-east-2 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
us-east-1 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
sa-east-1 X X X X X X X X X X
me-south-1 X X X X X X X X X
eu-west-3 X X X X X X X X X
eu-west-2 X X X X X X X X X
eu-west-1 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
eu-south-1 X X X X X X X X X
eu-north-1 X X X X X X X X X X
eu-central-1 X X X X X X X X X X X X X
ca-central-1 X X X X X X X X X
ap-southeast-3 X X
ap-southeast-2 X X X X X X X X X X
ap-southeast-1 X X X X X X X X X X X
ap-south-1 X X X X X X X X X X X
ap-northeast-3 X X
ap-northeast-2 X X X X X X X X X X
ap-northeast-1 X X X X X X X X X X X
ap-east-1 X X X X X X X X X
af-south-1 X X X X