AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 668

A company is running a high performance computing (HPC) workload on AWS across many Linux-based Amazon EC2 instances. The company needs a shared storage system that is capable of sub-millisecond latencies, hundreds of Gbps of throughput, and millions of IOPS. Users will store millions of small files.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. Mount the file system on each of the EC2 instance.
• B. Create an Amazon S3 bucket. Mount the S3 bucket on each of the EC2 instances.
• C. Ensure that the EC2 instances are Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) optimized. Mount Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) EBS volumes with Multi-Attach on each instance.
• D. Create an Amazon FSx for Lustre file system. Mount the file system on each of the EC2 instances.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon FSx for Lustre is a high-performance file system designed for compute-intensive workloads like HPC, offering sub-millisecond latencies, hundreds of Gbps of throughput, and millions of IOPS. Amazon EFS is not optimized for these extreme performance requirements, and Amazon S3 is an object store rather than a high-performance POSIX-compliant shared file system. Amazon EBS with Multi-Attach is block storage and does not natively handle a shared file system structure for many instances concurrently without a clustered file system manager.