Distributed AI on AWS: Reference Architectures & Examples

This repository contains reference architectures and examples for distributed AI training and inference on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, AWS ParallelCluster, AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The examples cover different model families and sizes, training frameworks and parallel optimizations (PyTorch DDP/FSDP, Megatron-LM, NeMo), and serving engines (vLLM, SGLang, NVIDIA Dynamo).

The major components of this repository are:

├── architectures/               # Cluster reference architectures (CloudFormation, Terraform)
├── ami/                         # Scripts to create Amazon Machine Images (Packer/Ansible)
├── examples/                    # Runnable training, inference, and use-case examples
├── validation/                  # Environment and cluster health validation tools
├── observability/               # Monitoring, metrics exporters, and profiling
└── micro-benchmarks/            # Micro-benchmarks (NCCL, NCCOM, NVSHMEM, etc.)

Workshops

You can follow the workshops below to train models on AWS. Each walks through several examples and shares practical guidance on operating a cluster for LLM training.

Name	Comments
AI on SageMaker HyperPod	Deploying, operating, and monitoring SageMaker HyperPod clusters
AWS ParallelCluster	The same journey on AWS ParallelCluster
AWS Parallel Computing Service	The same journey on AWS Parallel Computing Service

Blog

Posts about distributed AI on AWS are published at https://awslabs.github.io/awsome-distributed-ai/. The Hugo source lives on the content branch.

Blog content is editorially curated by AWS authors. Code samples in this repo (architectures/, examples/, etc.) accept external contributions as usual; see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Architectures

Each subdirectory under architectures/ is a deployable cluster architecture or a shared building block.

Name	Category	Usage
common	Storage	Common resources (S3 bucket, event notifications)
vpc_network	Network	Create a VPC with subnets and required resources
aws-parallelcluster	Compute	Cluster templates for GPU & custom silicon training
amazon-eks	Compute	CloudFormation templates for an EKS GPU cluster with EFA, and the eksctl manifests that preceded them
sagemaker-hyperpod-slurm	Compute	SageMaker HyperPod with Slurm orchestration
ldap_server	Identity	LDAP server for multi-user cluster access
sagemaker-hyperpod-eks	Compute	SageMaker HyperPod with EKS orchestration
accounting-database	Tooling	Accounting database for job tracking
aws-pcs	Compute	AWS Parallel Computing Service templates with Slurm scheduler

See docs/efa-cheatsheet.md for EFA tuning and the recommended environment variables.

Custom Amazon Machine Images

Custom machine images can be built using Packer for AWS ParallelCluster, Amazon EKS, and plain EC2. These images are based on Ansible roles and playbooks.

Examples

Examples live under examples/ and are organized along two axes:

• examples/training/ and examples/inference/ are framework-centric: the training or inference engine is the subject, and model variants underneath illustrate it (e.g. training/fsdp/, training/megatron-lm/, training/nemo/). Swapping the model gives "the same example with a different model."
• examples/use-cases/ is use-case-centric: a specific model or task is the subject and the framework is incidental (e.g. use-cases/detr-finetune/, use-cases/vjepa2/). Swapping the framework would still leave a recognizable demo.

Each example follows this general structure:

examples/
├── training/                   # framework-centric training/fine-tuning engines
│   └── <framework>/            # e.g. fsdp, deepspeed, megatron-lm, nemo, trl
│       └── <model>/            # e.g. llama3 (may be omitted for single-model cases)
│           ├── Dockerfile      # Container / environment setup
│           ├── README.md
│           ├── slurm/          # Slurm-specific launch scripts
│           └── kubernetes/     # Kubernetes manifests
├── inference/                  # framework-centric inference engines (vllm, …)
└── use-cases/                  # use-case-centric end-to-end demos
    └── <name>/                 # e.g. detr-finetune, esm2-hyperpod

The top-level directory for each example contains a general introduction and environment setup (Dockerfiles, training scripts, configs), while subdirectories provide service-specific launch instructions.

Browse examples/ to see the full list of frameworks, engines, and use cases.

Validation and Observability

Environment and cluster health validation tools live under validation/; monitoring stacks, metrics exporters, and profiling guides live under observability/.

Name	Comments
pytorch-env-validation	Validates your PyTorch environment
gpu-cluster-healthcheck	GPU cluster health checks
efa-node-exporter	Node exporter with Amazon EFA monitoring modules
prometheus-grafana	Monitoring for SageMaker HyperPod and EKS GPU clusters
nsight	Shows how to run Nvidia Nsight Systems to profile your workload

Micro-benchmarks

Micro-benchmarks for evaluating network and communication performance are under micro-benchmarks/.

Name	Comments
nccl-tests	NCCL collective communication benchmarks
nccom-tests	NCCOM communication benchmarks
nvshmem	NVSHMEM benchmarks
expert-parallelism	Expert parallelism (MoE) benchmarks

Contributors

Thanks to all the contributors for building, reviewing and testing.

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