Provides infrastructure layer compute capabilities, including both bare metal and virtual servers with various optimizations includins compute, memory, IO, and disk. Also supports accelerations options such as GPUs, FPGAs, Inferentia and Trainium.
Provides image recognition capability for images (in batch or real-time) and video that provides a analysis of the content such as real-world objects, faces, celebrities, and path mapping.
Provides a publish/subscribe notification service with multiple subscription types including Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Lambda, generic HTTPS endpoints, SMS and email.
A serverless, fully-managed, message queue service that supports producing, store, and consuming messages and enables loose coupling between applications.
Provides private networking capability spanning multiple availability zones and supporting subnets, routing, network access control groups, security groups and gateways.
Provides tracing of service invocations in distributed applications for observability, allowing users to diagnose issues or optimize their service interactions.
All about Cloud, mostly about Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon's New F1 Instance Type and FPGAs
2017-05-13 / 414 words / 2 minutes
In the beginning, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances could be thought of as virtual machines. When the CG1 instance type with GPU acceleration launched the line between virtual and physical machines blurred. That line continues to blur with the launch of EC2 F1 instance types with FPGAs. This post explains what an FPGA is, and when they should be used.
What are FPGAs?
Integrated circuits (ICs), also known as microchips, are built from millions of logic gates. Combinations of logic gates allow microchips to perform arithmetic, store simple values, compare values and run programs.
A Central Processing Unit (CPU) uses logic gates to make a general purpose microchip designed to run programs. CPUs are not optimized for any specific task, but they are very flexible. They are relatively easy to program and are used in Smartphones and computers running programs written in assembler language, C or C++ or even Java or C#. The fastest CPUs can be expensive but are readily available.
An Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) uses logic gates optimized for a specific purpose, but they are not at all flexible. They are often used in embedded devices, or to offload work from a CPU. For example, ASICs are often used in network cards. Designing and manufacturing ASICs requires very specialist knowledge and has a long lead time.
A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) also contains logic gates. In fact, it contains an array of them. The gates aren’t configured for general purpose or application specific use. The logic gates in an FPGA can be programmed to meet specific requirements and reprogrammed as often as necessary. The term “field programmable” comes from the ability to reprogram the FPGA after the device using it has been manufactured or sold.
The FPGA provides a compromise between general purpose CPUs and custom ASICs. If an ASIC design fails, it’s back to the drawing board. An FPGA can simply be reprogrammed. They are readily available and inexpensive. An FPGA can be optimized for a specific purpose.
AWS F1 Instances
AWS F1 Instances contain between 1 and 8 FPGAs and include all the software to design and test. FPGA designs can be saved and offered on the AWS Marketplace as AFI (Amazon FPGA Image).
An AMI containing FPGA development tools is available from the AWS Marketplace (see here) and a t1.micro instance costs just over 1¢/hour. It will be interesting to see how this type of computing evolves now AWS has made it more widely available.
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