This topic describes the naming conventions for some instance families and their instance types. This helps you compare their performance and features.
Naming conventions
Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) offers a range of instance families, with each family including multiple types of instances. The instance family name is in the ecs.<instance family> format. The instance type name is in the ecs.<instance family>.<nx>large format.
An instance name contains the following information:
ecs: is the product code of ECS.
<Instance family>: consists of an instance family name body and an instance family name suffix.
NoteOnly some instance types of instance families are described in this topic.
Heterogeneous computing instance families, ECS Bare Metal Instance families, and Super Computing Cluster (SCC) instance families
Heterogeneous computing instance families, ECS Bare Metal Instance families, and SCC instance families are named based on in-house naming conventions. Each instance family name consists of lowercase letters and a number.
Element
Description
Meaning
Instance family name body
Consists of lowercase letters.
gn: NVIDIA GPU-accelerated compute-optimized
vgn: NVIDIA GRID vGPU-accelerated dedicated
sgn: NVIDIA GRID vGPU-accelerated shared
gi: Intel GPU-accelerated compute-optimized
f: FPGA-accelerated compute-optimized
ebmc, ebmg, ebmr, ebmgn, and ebmhf: ECS Bare Metal Instance
sccc, sccg, scch, sccgn, and scchf: SCC
Instance family name suffix
Consists of lowercase letters and a number or only a number.
6v: 6 indicates the Volta or Turing architecture, and v indicates V100 GPUs with 16 GB of memory each.
For example, gn6v is a compute-optimized instance family that is powered by NVIDIA V100 GPUs with 16 GB of memory each based on the Volta or Turing architecture.
6e: 6 indicates the Volta or Turing architecture, and e, which is short for extend, indicates second-generation V100 GPUs with 32 GB of memory each.
For example, gn6e is a compute-optimized instance family that is powered by NVIDIA V100 GPUs with 32 GB of memory each based on the Volta or Turing architecture.
6i: 6 indicates the Volta or Turing architecture, and i indicates T4 GPUs.
For example, gn6i is a compute-optimized instance family that is powered by NVIDIA T4 GPUs based on the Volta or Turing architecture.
6s: 6 indicates the Volta or Turing architecture, and s indicates sixth-generation SG-1.
For example, ebmgi6s is a visual computing instance family that is powered by Intel® Server GPUs and sixth-generation SG-1.
7: indicates the Ampere architecture.
7i: 7 indicates the Ampere architecture, and i, which is short for inference, indicates A10 GPUs with 24 GB of memory each.
7e: 7 indicates the Ampere architecture.
7s: 7 indicates the Ampere architecture, and s indicates seventh-generation A30 GPUs.
<nx>large: the number of vCPUs that the instance type has. The larger the number n is, the more vCPUs the instance type has. For example, xlarge indicates four vCPUs, 2xlarge indicates eight vCPUs, and 3xlarge indicates 12 vCPUs.
GPU naming examples
The meanings of the names of GPU-accelerated compute-optimized and vGPU-accelerated instance families are described in this topic.
GPU-accelerated compute-optimized instance family
Example 1 : ecs.sccgn6.24xlarge indicates that this instance type belongs to the GPU-accelerated compute-optimized SCC instance family, sccgn6, and has 96 vCPUs (24×4 = 96 vCPUs).
Example 2 :ecs.ebmgn7e.32xlarge indicates that this instance type belongs to the GPU-accelerated compute-optimized ECS Bare Metal Instance family, ebmgn7e. The instance uses the Ampere architecture and has an NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80 GB of GPU memory and 128 vCPUs (32 × 4 = 128 vCPUs).
vGPU-accelerated instance family
Example :ecs.vgn6i-m4.xlarge indicates that this instance type belongs to the vGPU-accelerated instance family (vgn6i) that uses the NVIDIA GRID driver. It uses the Volta/Turing architecture and has an NVIDIA T4 GPU with four vCPUs.