Amazon Web Services → Microsoft Azure
Azure equivalent of Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)
AWS Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) maps to InfiniBand on Azure H-series and ND-series VMs.
About Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)
| Provider | Amazon Web Services |
|---|---|
| Status | Generally available |
| What it is | An OS-bypass network interface (SRD protocol) for MPI and NCCL traffic on supported instance types. |
| Documentation | docs.aws.amazon.com |
| Pricing | Official pricing page |
Azure mappings (1)
| Capability | Azure equivalent | Match |
|---|---|---|
| Low-latency HPC interconnect | InfiniBand on Azure HPC and GPU VMs | Partial match |
Batch & HPC(1)
Low-latency HPC interconnect Partial match
AWS Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) maps to InfiniBand on Azure H-series and ND-series VMs. Both give OS-bypass, RDMA-class networking for MPI and NCCL, but the technologies differ.
- Technology. EFA is AWS's own Ethernet-based fabric using the SRD protocol through libfabric. Azure uses NVIDIA (Mellanox) InfiniBand, with standard verbs, UCX, or HPC-X MPI stacks.
- Scope. EFA works on many supported instance types (HPC, GPU, and some general purpose) within a subnet or AZ, usually with cluster placement groups. Azure InfiniBand is available only on RDMA-capable H- and ND-series sizes, within one scale set or availability set.