An Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network device that you can attach to your Amazon EC2 instance to accelerate High Performance Computing (HPC) and machine learning applications. EFA enables you to achieve the application performance of an on-premises HPC cluster, with the scalability, flexibility, and elasticity provided by the AWS Cloud.
EFAs provide lower and more consistent latency and higher throughput than the TCP transport traditionally used in cloud-based HPC systems. It enhances the performance of inter-instance communication that is critical for scaling HPC and machine learning applications. It is optimized to work on the existing AWS network infrastructure and it can scale depending on application requirements.
EFAs integrate with Libfabric 1.7.0 and later and it supports Open MPI 3.1.3 and later and Intel MPI 2019 Update 5 and later for HPC applications, and Nvidia Collective Communications Library (NCCL) for machine learning applications.
