A company runs an HPC application on a single EC2 instance and needs to scale to multiple instances that require low‑latency, high‑bandwidth communication between them. What should the SysOps administrator do to meet this networking requirement?

A cluster placement group places instances close together within a single Availability Zone, enabling low-latency, high-bandwidth network communication crucial for HPC applications. Creating an AMI of the existing instance ensures all new instances have the necessary application and configuration. Launching all instances into the same cluster placement group guarantees they benefit from the optimized network. Creating an AMI and using an Auto Scaling group alone doesn't guarantee low-latency networking, as instances might be spread across different hardware. Deploying a Network Load Balancer is for distributing incoming traffic, not for optimizing inter-instance communication within an HPC cluster. Launching cloned instances into the same Availability Zone doesn't guarantee the necessary proximity and network performance that a cluster placement group provides.