AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 248

A company has built a high performance computing (HPC) cluster in AWS for a tightly coupled workload that generates a large number of shared files stored in
Amazon EFS. The cluster was performing well when the number of Amazon EC2 instances in the cluster was 100. However, when the company increased the cluster size to 1,000 EC2 instances, overall performance was well below expectations.
Which collection of design choices should a solutions architect make to achieve the maximum performance from the HPC cluster? (Choose three.)

Answer options

• A. Ensure the HPC cluster is launched within a single Availability Zone.
• B. Launch the EC2 instances and attach elastic network interfaces in multiples of four.
• C. Select EC2 instance types with an Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) enabled.
• D. Ensure the clusters is launched across multiple Availability Zones.
• E. Replace Amazon EFS win multiple Amazon EBS volumes in a RAID array.
• F. Replace Amazon EFS with Amazon FSx for Lustre.

Correct answer: A, C, F

Explanation

The correct choices are A, C, and F. Launching the cluster in a single Availability Zone (A) minimizes latency and improves performance for tightly coupled workloads. Using EC2 instances with EFA (C) enhances network performance for HPC applications. Replacing Amazon EFS with Amazon FSx for Lustre (F) provides better performance for high throughput workloads. Options B, D, and E either do not address the specific performance needs or could introduce additional complexities without guaranteeing improved performance.