Microsoft Azure → Amazon Web Services
AWS equivalent of InfiniBand on Azure HPC and GPU VMs
The closest AWS equivalent of InfiniBand on Azure HPC and GPU VMs is Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).
About InfiniBand on Azure HPC and GPU VMs
| Provider | Microsoft Azure |
|---|---|
| Status | Generally available |
| What it is | RDMA-capable InfiniBand on H-series (HB, HX) and ND-series VMs for MPI and NCCL. It works within a scale set or availability set. |
| Documentation | learn.microsoft.com |
| Pricing | Official pricing page |
AWS mappings (1)
| Capability | AWS equivalent | Match |
|---|---|---|
| Low-latency HPC interconnect | Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) | 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.