EFA – fundamentals, capabilities, and use cases

Amazon EC2’s EFA is a networking innovation specifically designed to meet the evolving requirements of HPC and ML workloads on AWS. EFA is designed to overcome the limitations of traditional network interfaces by providing lower latency and higher throughput. EFA delivers consistent latency, higher network throughput, and better scalability than traditional network interfaces. It achieves this superior performance and reduces overall communication overhead by bypassing the OS kernel, providing a direct path for communication between instances and the network adapter.

In this section, we will explore the purpose and use cases of EFA, as well as discuss supported instance types and some significant features of it.

Supported instance types

EFA is available on a variety of Amazon EC2 instance types, catering to diverse workloads and performance needs. These include the R5 and R5d families, which are optimized for memory...