AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 610

A solutions architect needs to host a high performance computing (HPC) workload in the AWS Cloud. The workload will run on hundreds of Amazon EC2 instances and will require parallel access to a shared file system to enable distributed processing of large datasets. Datasets will be accessed across multiple instances simultaneously. The workload requires access latency within 1 ms. After processing has completed, engineers will need access to the dataset for manual postprocessing.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) as a shared file system. Access the dataset from Amazon EFS.
• B. Mount an Amazon S3 bucket to serve as the shared file system. Perform postprocessing directly from the S3 bucket.
• C. Use Amazon FSx for Lustre as a shared file system. Link the file system to an Amazon S3 bucket for postprocessing.
• D. Configure AWS Resource Access Manager to share an Amazon S3 bucket so that it can be mounted to all instances for processing and postprocessing.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon FSx for Lustre is optimized for high performance computing (HPC) workloads, providing parallel access to shared storage with sub-millisecond latencies. By linking the FSx for Lustre file system to Amazon S3, data can be easily ingested, processed at high speeds, and then written back to S3 where engineers can access it for manual postprocessing. Amazon EFS does not match the performance scale required for intensive HPC workloads, and Amazon S3 is object storage that does not natively support sub-millisecond parallel file system access.