Availability of FPGAs and GPUs

One of the key use cases for customers adopting the public cloud has been the availability of high-end processing units that are required to run HPC applications. One such new instance type added last year was the F1 instance, which comes equipped with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your applications. Another awesome feature to be added to the EC2 instance family was the introduction of the Elastic GPUs concept. This allows you to easily provide graphics acceleration support to your applications at significantly lower costs but with greater performance levels. Elastic GPUs are ideal if you need a small amount of GPU for graphics acceleration, or have applications that could benefit from some GPU, but also require high amounts of compute, memory, or storage.