AWS, Intel Collaborate On New Haswell Xeon Instances
New instances unveiled by Amazon Web Services this week based on a customized version of Intel's Xeon E5 processor reflect what the cloud provider emphasized is a steady increase in the "intensity" of workloads running on the cloud.
AWS CTO Werner Vogels unveiled the new instances, based on the "Haswell" Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors that Intel launched in September, dubbed C4 during the AWS re:Invent confab in Las Vegas. The new instance type for Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) platform is specifically based on a Xeon E5-2666 v3 processor with up to 36 virtual cores across two sockets. AWS said it would implement the custom version of the processor on EC2 running at a base speed of 2.9 GHz. It would also be capable of 3.5 GHz speeds with a Turbo boost.
The new C4 instances will again use hardware virtualization to squeeze the most performance from Haswell, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr noted in a blog post. Barr added that the new instances would operate within a virtual private cloud.
The "compute optimized" instances have "more virtual CPUs than EC2 has ever had before," Vogels said, adding that C4 would be optimized by default to the AWS Elastic Block Storage offering. That means EBS connectivity will be free.
In conjunction with the new instances, Vogels also stressed networking improvements that AWS said would boost network performance and reliability. AWS also announced new EBS volumes, including up to 160 MB/sec for general-purpose instances and up to 320 MB/sec for provisioned IOPS.
Much of Vogels' keynote was devoted to a growing list of workloads that include application development for everything from sushi bars to weather forecasting. The cloud giant also announced a new EC2 container service using Docker containers operating across a cluster of EC2 instances.
All this was intended to show the growing diversity and complexity of workloads running on the Amazon cloud. Those workload demands prompted AWS to collaborate with Intel on a custom version of the chipmaker's Xeon CPU technology.
Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, also stressed the growing diversity of workloads that drove development of the new AWS instances. Hence, Intel designed a custom version of the Haswell processor exclusively for AWS.
Through the engineering collaboration between Intel and AWS, "we were able to tune the attributes of the [Haswell] processor to take advantage of the insights into the actual Amazon environment," Bryant explained.
Sticking with the diversity theme, the partners also stressed that the custom processor could handle engineering, scientific, or big data analytics workloads.
With the introduction of the C4 Haswell-based instances, AWS also appears to be paying closer attention to the requirements of the high-performance computing community, as was pointed out in our sister publication, HPCwire.
This week's roll out of the C4 instances included preliminary specs. AWS said it would release pricing and additional technical specifications later.
