AMD Preps Second Round of HPC System Donations For COVID-19 Research
by Ryan Smith on September 14, 2020 9:00 AM EST
When things aren’t blowing up or burning down as of late, there’s still the matter of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While the first generation of vaccines move carefully closer to approval, there’s still a lot of research left to be done, and various technology industry companies and consortiums have been stepping up to provide computing resources for those efforts. One such participant has been AMD, whom in June announced that the company would be donating 7 petaflops of high-performance computing systems, and now this morning is announcing that they are preparing for a second round of awards, which will entail a further 5 petaflops of hardware.
As with AMD’s previous efforts, the second round of donations from the company’s COVID-19 HPC fund will see the company awarding AMD-powered systems to various research institutions. The hardware includes systems based on AMD’s EPYC “Rome” processors, which fittingly are being paired with AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerators. According to the company, recipients can either take direct delivery of the hardware, or receive access to datacenter-hosted hardware courtesy of Penguin Computing.
Overall, 21 research institutions have or are now set to receive computing hardware under the program, including Cambridge University and Stanford School of Medicine. The new hardware for these institutions is expected to be operational by the start of Q4, at which point it will be used for “genomics, vaccine development, transmission science and modeling.”
Source: AMD
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
18 Comments
View All Comments
AdhesiveTeflon - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link
Or you can quickly google the donations made by the companies. I found this in 5 seconds:https://fortune.com/2020/04/07/intel-coronavirus-a...
Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Did you even bother read the links you shared in any detail?Nvidia's page is 90% marketing fluff about how great their products are but with a COVID palette-swap, and oh yes, some guy that works for them designed a ventilator. Most of what they've done is join a few organisations and big-up their toolkits, which admittedly are super useful for this, but were already there beforehand anyway. It's not exactly a standout effort - the use of their systems for Folding@Home appears to be the most direct contribution.
Intel's is very much the same - it's a marketing page, designed to talk about how amazing they are for doing the same basic stuff that basically everybody else is doing - but blue flavoured!
IBM's goes along the same lines - "people bought our stuff and did good things with it" mixed in with "look how caring our HR are taking great pains to appear to be in public". The BOINC stuff is good, though.
Microsoft's "Help for Jobseekers" probably comes closest to a similar-scale effort, though with most things Microsoft give away for free it's eminently self-serving - they're trying to create a digital future where people are intimately familiar with their products. Standard stuff, really.
nandnandnand - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
This donation by AMD is what, 1000 GPUs? Less than $1 million?Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Then Intel and Nvidia should be able to match it a few times over, right?...
Right guys?
...
Helloooo?
(It's a good PR move by AMD, I'll admit - getting their products and toolchains into the hands of people who now have no excuse not to use it. CUDA may be ubiquitous but you can't beat free).
deksman2 - Wednesday, September 16, 2020 - link
CUDA is only ubiquitous because NV paid devs large sums of money to code programs to make use of it.OpenCL is just as capable (Even moreso), is open-source and operates on ANY GPU.
catavalon21 - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
Support for OpenCL of late has shown cracks of late. At launch, AMD's 5700 series GPUs didn't have (very good) driver support for OpenCL. Initial benchmarks all but failed to run OpenCL apps. While they came out with updates to largely remedy the issue, I'm not sure it has the support it once did.catavalon21 - Thursday, September 24, 2020 - link
#proofread fail. Too many "of late"s.nickvoz - Saturday, September 26, 2020 - link
Hi there! All those who need to overcome the problem of editing his papers, recommend you one essay writing service https://essaywriter.org/buy-research-paper. As well as with the promo-code first15 you will receive a discount on the first order, have a nice day!