SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Sept. 14, 2020 — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced a second round of high-performance technology contributions to assist in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. AMD is now contributing high-end computing systems or access to Penguin-On-Demand (POD) cloud-based clusters powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYCTM and AMD Radeon Instinct processors to 21 institutions and research facilities conducting COVID-19 research. With 12 petaflops of total supercomputing capacity now awarded, the combined compute capacity donated through the AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund would rank among the fastest supercomputers in the world according to the most recent Top500 list.
“AMD is proud to be working with leading global research institutions to bring the power of high performance computing technology to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer, AMD. “These donations of AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct processors will help researchers not only deepen their understanding of COVID-19, but also help improve our ability to respond to future potential threats to global health.”
The AMD COVID-19 HPC fund was established to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. In addition to the donations of $15 million of high-performance computing systems, AMD has contributed technology and technical resources to nearly double the peak system of the “Corona” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which is being used to provide additional computing power for molecular modeling in support of COVID-19 research.
The second round of AMD-donated compute capacity is expected to be operational starting in Q4 of this year and will be used for a number of pandemic-related workloads including genomics, vaccine development, transmission science and modeling. Research projects range from evolutionary modeling of the virus, to understanding the virus spike protein activation that occurs prior to first interaction between the coronavirus and human cell, and large scale fluid dynamics simulations of COVID-19 droplets as they travel through the air. To maximize the impact of the research, AMD is also initiating a working group for COVID-19 HPC Fund recipients and AMD engineers to jointly discuss research areas and findings as well as hardware and software optimizations that can accelerate their collective work.
To date, the AMD COVID-19 HPC fund has donated computing systems or cloud-based computing capacity to: Cambridge University, Carnegie Mellon, GENCI / French National High-Performance Computing Agency, Harvard Children’s Hospital, High Performance Computing Center (HLRS) / the University of Stuttgart, MIT, NYU, CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute in India, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), Rice, Stanford School of Medicine, Texas State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, University of Arkansas, University of Toronto, University of Trento, University of Vermont, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Washington University.
AMD continues to work with well-known HPC and AI solutions firm Penguin Computing, a division of SMART Global Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SGH), to define, build, and deliver on-premises systems and Penguin Computing’s POD clusters, powered by AMD. Penguin Computing’s POD support is collocated in data center space donated by DataBank. Contributions from GigabyteTM, Nvidia Networking, and others are also supporting the AMD HPC Fund.
“Penguin Computing is proud to announce that the first petaflop of compute capacity in our datacenter is now online and available for researchers to begin advancing the science of pandemic research to help find new ways to fight COVID-19. We look forward to continuing to support AMD and the latest round of universities and labs to participate in this global effort with Penguin Computing’s applications and technology expertise,” said Sid Mair, President, Penguin Computing Inc.
Gigabyte is supplying its G291-Z20 compute nodes for the Penguin Computing clusters, built around a single, 48-core AMD EPYC 7642 processor paired with eight Radeon InstinctTM MI50 GPU accelerators. The system R182-Z91 management nodes, also from Gigabyte, each utilize two 16-core, AMD EPYC 7302 processors.
source: AMD
