Why Amazon EC2 F2 instances?
Amazon EC2 F2 instances, the second-generation FPGA-powered instances, are purpose built to develop and deploy reconfigurable hardware in the cloud and deliver up to 60% better price performance than first-generation F1 instances. F2 instances are powered by up to 8 AMD Virtex UltraScale+ HBM VU47P FPGAs and are the first FPGA-based instances to feature 16GB of high-bandwidth memory. They feature a 3rd generation AMD EPYC (Milan) processor with 3x processor cores (192 vCPU), 4x networking bandwidth (100 Gbps), 2x system memory (2 TiB), and 2x NVMe SSD (7.6 TiB), compared to F1 instances. You can use F2 instances to power FPGA-accelerated solutions in genomics, multimedia processing, big data, network security/acceleration, and cloud-based video broadcasting.
F2 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI. They provide development environments for low-level hardware development and software development in C/C++ and openCL environments (available on our GitHub). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F2 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times as you like, and across as many F2 instances as you like. AFI simplifies the development process by eliminating the need for per-user licenses required in Xilinx-based flows, allowing you to program the FPGAs on your F2 instance as many times as you like with no additional fees or software charges for development tools when using the FPGA developer AMI.
Benefits
Use cases
Genomics research and analysis
F2 instances are the ideal for processing massive amounts of genomics data, provide the fastest time to results, with best accuracy and low cost per genome. FPGAs can provide up to 30x Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) compute acceleration compared to the latest CPU based instances on AWS.
Networking and security
F2 instances deliver the ability to efficiently compute networking packets at line rate using the virtual ethernet feature. With this capability, FPGAs on F2 instances can be used for security applications like deep packet inspection, high-performance load-balancers, or other networking applications that require real-time packet processing.
Multimedia processing
Live broadcast video transcoding applications using F2 instances deliver higher performance than applications using compute instances. F2 instances are an ideal solution to meet the requirements of these applications, reducing the compute costs without compromising quality.
Big data and search analytics
The volume, variety, and velocity of data analysis and search requirements in many big data applications have risen to the point where customers are looking for hardware acceleration to keep up. For those applications, customers can leverage the increased performance of F2 instances to meet their big data analytics and search requirements.
ASIC emulation and prototyping
F2 instances can also be used for emulation and prototyping during more complex ASIC developments.
Customer Testimonials
Here are some examples of how customers and partners have achieved their business goals with Amazon EC2 F2 instances.
NeuroBlade is at the forefront of accelerating data analytics with its innovative SQL Processing Unit (SPU), which seamlessly integrates with a variety of open-source query engines such as Presto and Apache Spark.
“In today’s AI-driven world, where data analytics is growing at an unprecedented pace, traditional CPU-centric instances are struggling to scale alongside the explosion of data. NeuroBlade’s SPU, leveraging the FPGA devices available in Amazon EC2 F2 instances, provides a breakthrough solution with faster query processing and market-leading query throughput efficiency (QpH/$). The new Amazon EC2 F2 instance enables cloud users to harness this cutting-edge hardware acceleration, empowering them to run workloads closer to their data and unlock exceptional performance and scalability in a cloud-native environment.”
- Elad Sity, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of NeuroBlade
Illumina DRAGEN Dynamic Read Analysis for GENomics) secondary analysis enables labs of all sizes and disciplines to maximize their genomic data with an accurate, comprehensive, and efficient suite of bioinformatics tools. Building upon a longstanding strategic partnership and existing deployment on FPGA-based Amazon EC2 F1 instances, DRAGEN secondary analysis pipelines will be deployed on Amazon EC2 F2 instances to enable customers with hardware-accelerated implementation of genomic analysis algorithms, expanding compute capacity and scientific insight at scale. DRAGEN is accessible through Illumina Connected Analytics as a part of a broader Connected Software ecosystem deployed on AWS.
Product Details
| Instance Name | FPGAs | vCPU | FPGA Memory HB M / DDR4 | Instance Memory (GiB) | Local Storage (GiB) | Network Bandwidth (Gbps) | EBS Bandwidth (Gbps) |
| f2.12xlarge | 2 | 48 | 32 GiB / 128 GiB | 512 | 2x 950 | 25 Gbps | 15 Gbps |
| f2.48xlarge | 8 | 192 | 128 GiB / 512 GiB | 2048 | 8x 950 | 100 Gbps | 60 Gbps |
Getting Started with F2 instances
FPGA Development Kit
Developers can get started on F2 instances using the AWS FPGA Development Kit. The kit is avaliable on GitHub and includes all documentation on F2, internal FPGA interfaces, and compiler scripts for generating Amazon FPGA Images (AFIs). AWS FPGAs support multiple development environments to serve both hardware and software developers. The HDK provides fully custom hardware development, and the software-defined environment allows developing accelerations using C/C++/OpenCL code with no hardware knowledge needed. This allows for fast FPGA development for the EC2 F2 instances.
FPGA Developer AMI
The FPGA Developer AMI includes Xilinx Vivado at no additional software charge as well as a prepackaged tool development environment with scripts and tools for simulating your FPGA design and building and registering your AFI. The FPGA Developer AMI also includes tools for debugging and compiling your code. You can deploy the FPGA Developer AMI on an Amazon EC2 instance and quickly provision the resources you need to write and test your FPGA design.