AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 711

A company is planning to build a high performance computing (HPC) workload as a service solution that is hosted on AWS. A group of 16 Amazon EC2 Linux instances requires the lowest possible latency for node-to-node communication. The instances also need a shared block device volume for high-performing storage.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use a cluster placement group. Attach a single Provisioned IOPS SSD Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume to all the instances by using Amazon EBS Multi-Attach.
• B. Use a cluster placement group. Create shared file systems across the instances by using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).
• C. Use a partition placement group. Create shared file systems across the instances by using Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).
• D. Use a spread placement group. Attach a single Provisioned IOPS SSD Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume to all the instances by using Amazon EBS Multi-Attach.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

A cluster placement group is required to achieve the lowest possible node-to-node network latency by placing the EC2 instances physically close together within a single Availability Zone. To meet the shared block storage requirement, Amazon EBS Multi-Attach allows attaching a single Provisioned IOPS SSD volume to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously. Amazon EFS is incorrect because it provides file storage rather than the required block storage, and other placement groups do not offer the low latency required for HPC workloads.