High Performance Computing Lens - AWS Well-Architected Framework

Publication date: June 23, 2025 (Document revisions)

The AWS Well-Architected High Performance Computing (HPC) Lens describes user scenarios, questions related to the AWS Well-Architected pillars, best practices, and prescriptive guidance for customers building their workloads. This lens is defined within the AWS Well-Architected Framework, covers common HPC customer scenarios, and identifies key architectural elements that help you build your workloads according to AWS best practices.

Introduction

This document describes the AWS Well-Architected High-Performance Computing (HPC) Lens, a collection of customer-proven scenarios and best practices for designing well-architected HPC workloads. The HPC Lens contains insights that AWS has gathered from real-world case studies and helps you learn the key design elements of well-architected compute workloads along with recommendations for improvement. The document is intended for IT architects, developers, and team members who build and operate HPC systems.

You can use this lens to learn and implement architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The Well-Architected Framework provides a way for you to consistently measure your architectures against best practices and identify areas for improvement. We believe that having well-architected systems greatly increases the likelihood of business success.

In this lens, we focus in on how to design, deploy, and architect your HPC workloads in the AWS Cloud. HPC workloads run exceptionally well in the cloud. The spiky nature of HPC workloads make them well suited for pay-as-you-go and elastic cloud infrastructure. In addition, the ability to fine-tune cloud resources and create cloud architectures provide greater flexibility than static, on-premises environments.

For brevity, we only cover details from the AWS Well-Architected Framework that are specific to HPC workloads. When designing your architecture, we recommend that you consider best practices and strategies from the AWS Well- Architected Framework.

This paper is intended for those in technology roles, such as chief technology officers (CTOs), architects, developers, and operations team members. After reading this paper, you will understand AWS best practices and strategies to use when designing and operating HPC in a cloud environment.

Lens availability

The HPC Lens is available as an AWS-official lens in the Lens Catalog of the AWS Well-Architected Tool.

To get started, follow the steps in Adding a lens to a workload and select the HPC Lens.