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User Guide for Linux Instances

AWS Documentation » Amazon EC2 » User Guide for Linux Instances » Amazon EC2 Instances » Instance Types » Linux Accelerated Computing Instances

Linux Accelerated Computing Instances

If you require high processing capability, you'll benefit from using accelerated computing instances, which provide access to hardware-based compute accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Accelerated computing instances enable more parallelism for higher throughput on compute-intensive workloads.

GPU-based instances provide access to NVIDIA GPUs with thousands of compute cores. You can use GPU-based accelerated computing instances to accelerate scientific, engineering, and rendering applications by leveraging the CUDA or Open Computing Language (OpenCL) parallel computing frameworks. You can also use them for graphics applications, including game streaming, 3-D application streaming, and other graphics workloads.

FPGA-based instances provide access to large FPGAs with millions of parallel system logic cells. You can use FPGA-based accelerated computing instances to accelerate workloads such as genomics, financial analysis, real-time video processing, big data analysis, and security workloads by leveraging custom hardware accelerations. You can develop these accelerations using hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL, or by using higher-level languages such as OpenCL parallel computing frameworks. You can either develop your own hardware acceleration code or purchase hardware accelerations through the AWS Marketplace.

Important

FPGA-based instances do not support Microsoft Windows.

You can cluster accelerated computing instances into a placement group. Placement groups provide low latency and high-bandwidth connectivity between the instances within a single Availability Zone. For more information, see Placement Groups.

Contents

For information about Windows accelerated computing instances, see Windows Accelerated Computing Instances in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances.

Accelerated Computing Instance Families

Accelerated computing instance families use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform some functions, such as floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs. The following accelerated computing instance families are available for you to launch in Amazon EC2.

F1 Instances

F1 instances use Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P FPGAs and are designed to accelerate computationally intensive algorithms, such as data-flow or highly-parallel operations not suited to general purpose CPUs. Each FPGA in an F1 instance contains approximately 2.5 million logic elements and approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines, along with 64 GiB of local DDR ECC protected memory, connected to the instance by a dedicated PCIe Gen3 x16 connection. F1 instances support enhanced networking with the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), are EBS-optimized by default, and provide local NVMe SSD volumes.

Developers can use the FPGA Developer AMI and AWS Hardware Developer Kit to create custom hardware accelerations for use on F1 instances. The FPGA Developer AMI includes development tools for full-cycle FPGA development in the cloud. Using these tools, developers can create and share Amazon FPGA Images (AFIs) that can be loaded onto the FPGA of an F1 instance.

For more information, see Amazon EC2 F1 Instances.

P2 Instances

P2 instances use NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs and are designed for general purpose GPU computing using the CUDA or OpenCL programming models. P2 instances provide high bandwidth networking, powerful single and double precision floating-point capabilities, and 12 GiB of memory per GPU, which makes them ideal for deep learning, graph databases, high performance databases, computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, rendering, and other server-side GPU compute workloads.

G2 Instances

G2 instances use NVIDIA GRID K520 GPUs and provide a cost-effective, high-performance platform for graphics applications using DirectX or OpenGL. NVIDIA GRID GPUs also support NVIDIA’s fast capture and encode API operations. Example applications include video creation services, 3D visualizations, streaming graphics-intensive applications, and other server-side graphics workloads.

CG1 Instances

CG1 instances use NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and are designed for general purpose GPU computing using the CUDA or OpenCL programming models. CG1 instances provide customers with high bandwidth networking, double precision floating-point capabilities, and error-correcting code (ECC) memory, making them ideal for high performance computing (HPC) applications.

Hardware Specifications

For more information about the hardware specifications for each Amazon EC2 instance type, see Amazon EC2 Instances.

Accelerated Computing Instance Limitations

Accelerated computing instances have the following limitations:

AMIs for GPU-based Accelerated Computing Instances

To help you get started, NVIDIA provides AMIs for GPU-based accelerated computing instances. These reference AMIs include the NVIDIA driver, which enables full functionality and performance of the NVIDIA GPUs.

For a list of AMIs with the NVIDIA driver, see AWS Marketplace (NVIDIA GRID).

You can launch accelerated computing instances using any HVM AMI.

Installing the NVIDIA Driver on Amazon Linux

A GPU-based accelerated computing instance must have the appropriate NVIDIA driver. The NVIDIA driver that you install must be compiled against the kernel that you plan to run on your instance.

Amazon provides AMIs with updated and compatible builds of the NVIDIA kernel drivers for each official kernel upgrade in the AWS Marketplace. If you decide to use a different NVIDIA driver version than the one that Amazon provides, or decide to use a kernel that's not an official Amazon build, you must uninstall the Amazon-provided NVIDIA packages from your system to avoid conflicts with the versions of the drivers that you are trying to install.

Use this command to uninstall Amazon-provided NVIDIA packages:

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[ec2-user ~]$ sudo yum erase nvidia cuda

The Amazon-provided CUDA toolkit package has dependencies on the NVIDIA drivers. Uninstalling the NVIDIA packages erases the CUDA toolkit. You must reinstall the CUDA toolkit after installing the NVIDIA driver.

You can download NVIDIA drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx. Select the appropriate driver for your instance:

P2 Instances

Product Type Tesla
Product Series K-Series
Product K-80
Operating System Linux 64-bit
Recommended/Beta Recommended/Certified

G2 Instances

Product Type GRID
Product Series GRID Series
Product GRID K520
Operating System Linux 64-bit
Recommended/Beta Recommended/Certified

CG1 Instances

Product Type Tesla
Product Series M-Class
Product M2050
Operating System Linux 64-bit
Recommended/Beta Recommended/Certified

For more information about installing and configuring the driver, choose the ADDITIONAL INFORMATION tab on the download page for the driver on the NVIDIA website and choose the README link.

Installing the NVIDIA Driver Manually

To install the driver for an Amazon Linux AMI

  1. Run the yum update command to get the latest versions of packages for your instance. 

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo yum update -y

  2. Reboot your instance to load the latest kernel version.

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo reboot

  3. Reconnect to your instance after it has rebooted.

  4. Install the gcc compiler and the kernel-devel package for the version of the kernel you are currently running. 

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo yum install -y gcc kernel-devel-`uname -r`

  5. Download the driver package that you identified earlier. For example, the following command downloads the 352.99 version of the NVIDIA driver for P2 instances. 

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    [ec2-user ~]$ wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/352.99/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.99.run

  6. Run the self-install script to install the NVIDIA driver. For example:

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo /bin/bash ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.99.run

  7. Reboot the instance.

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo reboot

  8. Confirm that the driver is functional. The response for the following command lists the installed NVIDIA driver version and details about the GPUs.

    Note

    This command may take several minutes to run.

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    [ec2-user ~]$ nvidia-smi -q | head

==============NVSMI LOG==============

Timestamp                           : Thu Aug 25 04:59:03 2016
Driver Version                      : 352.99

Attached GPUs                       : 8
GPU 0000:00:04.0
    Product Name                    : Tesla K80
    Product Brand                   : Tesla

  9. (P2 instances only) If you are using a P2 instance, complete the optimization steps in the next section to achieve the best performance from your GPU.

Optimizing GPU Settings (P2 Instances Only)

There are several GPU setting optimizations that you can perform to achieve the best performance on P2 instances. By default, the NVIDIA driver uses an autoboost feature, which varies the GPU clock speeds. By disabling the autoboost feature and setting the GPU clock speeds to their maximum frequency, you can consistently achieve the maximum performance with your P2 instances. The following procedure helps you to configure the GPU settings to be persistent, disable the autoboost feature, and set the GPU clock speeds to their maximum frequency.

To optimize P2 GPU settings

  1. Configure the GPU settings to be persistent.

    Note

    This command may take several minutes to run.

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:0F.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:10.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:11.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:12.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:13.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:14.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:15.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:16.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:17.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:18.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:19.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:1A.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:1B.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:1C.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:1D.0.
Enabled persistence mode for GPU 0000:00:1E.0.
All done.

  2. Disable the autoboost feature for all GPUs on the instance.

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo nvidia-smi --auto-boost-default=0
All done.

  3. Set all GPU clock speeds to their maximum frequency.

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo nvidia-smi -ac 2505,875
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:0F.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:10.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:11.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:12.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:13.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:14.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:15.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:16.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:17.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:18.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:19.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:1A.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:1B.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:1C.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:1D.0
Applications clocks set to "(MEM 2505, SM 875)" for GPU 0000:00:1E.0
All done.

Getting Started with FPGA Development

The FPGA Developer AMI provides the tools you need to develop, test, and build AFIs. You can use the FPGA Developer AMI on any EC2 instance with at least 32 GB of system memory (for example, C4 instances).

For more information, see the documentation for the AWS FPGA Hardware Development Kit.