AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 663

A company copies 200 TB of data from a recent ocean survey onto AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices. The company has a high performance computing (HPC) cluster that is hosted on AWS to look for oil and gas deposits. A solutions architect must provide the cluster with consistent sub-millisecond latency and high-throughput access to the data on the Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices. The company is sending the devices back to AWS.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket. Import the data into the S3 bucket. Configure an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway to use the S3 bucket. Access the file gateway from the HPC cluster instances.
• B. Create an Amazon S3 bucket. Import the data into the S3 bucket. Configure an Amazon FSx for Lustre file system, and integrate it with the S3 bucket. Access the FSx for Lustre file system from the HPC cluster instances.
• C. Create an Amazon S3 bucket and an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. Import the data into the S3 bucket. Copy the data from the S3 bucket to the EFS file system. Access the EFS file system from the HPC cluster instances.
• D. Create an Amazon FSx for Lustre file system. Import the data directly into the FSx for Lustre file system. Access the FSx for Lustre file system from the HPC cluster instances.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon FSx for Lustre is specifically designed for high performance computing (HPC) workloads, providing the sub-millisecond latency and high throughput required for processing large datasets. Snowball Edge devices must import data into Amazon S3 first, which can then be seamlessly integrated with FSx for Lustre as a data repository. Other options like AWS Storage Gateway and Amazon EFS do not offer the optimized performance characteristics needed for HPC, and direct Snowball import to FSx is not supported.