CFD, FEA and other solvers scale across many cores, which suits the cloud, but solver licences often cost more than the compute and decide the architecture. AWS Parallel Computing Service (managed Slurm), ParallelCluster and AWS Batch compared, what HPC instances and EFA add, and how to burst without paying for idle licences.
An in-house cluster sized for the peak is idle most of the month and still too small in the week before a deadline. The cloud fixes the shape of that problem. It does not fix the licence count.
Book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
HPC-optimized instances (the Hpc7a, Hpc7g and Hpc6id families) for tightly coupled solvers that communicate constantly between nodes.
Elastic Fabric Adapter for low-latency MPI traffic between those nodes.
FSx for Lustre for scratch storage that many nodes read and write at once, linked to S3 for inputs and results.
Spot instances for jobs that checkpoint, which cuts compute cost substantially but needs solvers and workflows that tolerate interruption.
Commercial solvers are often licensed per core or per job, and those licences frequently cost more than the instances. Scaling to 1,000 cores for an hour does not help if you hold licences for 128. Before designing the cluster:
Read the licence terms for cloud use, and ask the vendor about cloud or burst licensing.
Decide where the license server runs and how cluster nodes reach it, including when the VPN is down.
Benchmark scaling: many solvers stop speeding up past a certain core count, so more cores add licence cost without saving time.
Queue by licence availability, so jobs wait for a licence rather than failing after the instances have started.
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