fbpx

AMD Expands High-Performance Compute Fund to Aid Researchers

AMD has announced the expansion of its High Performance Compute (HPC) Fund with the addition of 7 petaflops of computing power to assist global researchers working to solve the most demanding challenges facing society today.

AMD also announced that the AMD HPC Fund will now integrate Xilinx Heterogeneous Accelerated Compute Clusters (HACC) program, providing researchers with access to AMD EPYC processors, AMD Instinct accelerators, Xilinx Alveo accelerators and Xilinx Versal ACAPs to advance research in areas including climate change, health care, transportation, big data and more.

The new contribution brings the total amount of computing capacity donated by AMD to over 20 petaflops with a market value of more than $31 million, as of May 2022.

The additional computing resources will build on the AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund that was established in 2020 to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases.

“We are witnessing a scientific computing revolution where high-performance computing resources vastly reduce the time to insights and discovery,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer, AMD.

“By broadening the AMD HPC Fund beyond COVID-19, we are putting leading-edge compute power in the hands of those that need it most – the researchers solving the world’s toughest problems.”

To date, AMD has donated computing systems or cloud-based computing capacity to more than 28 institutions across eight countries.

Nearly 6,000 researchers have received access to AMD technologies for their projects, resulting in 55 papers published so far on key issues like disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates by race and ethnicity and improvements in the classification of breast cancer imagery through deep vision techniques.

“As a leader in high-performance and adaptive computing, AMD has the unique ability and opportunity to support institutions that are conducting groundbreaking research for the benefit of our communities and the planet,” said Susan Moore, AMD corporate vice president of corporate responsibility and international government affairs and AMD Foundation president.

“The AMD HPC Fund exemplifies our commitment to our digital impact goal that 100 million people will benefit from AMD technology and philanthropy initiatives for STEM education, scientific research and the workforce of the future by 2025.”

AMD will grant cloud-based access to global universities and research institutions with support from leading system partners Supermicro and WEKA.io.

In Singapore, AMD has donated AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct Accelerators to the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), providing researchers and students access to High Performance Computing (HPC) systems to enable and nurture next generation technology leaders.

“We are studying highly complex Machine Learning techniques that require us to run multiple compute and memory-intensive experiments. The AMD cluster has a high core count with large RAM, allowing us to run multiple experiments across the cluster,” said Eric Han, a fourth year PhD student at NUS Computing,

High-performance computing is a key tool in research laboratories around the world helping to accelerate scientific research and perform complex simulations. AMD sees great potential for HPC to benefit society and will continue to invest in local institutions to drive research and innovation in numerous fields.

While prior HPC Fund grants were more COVID-19 focused, AMD is now expanding its donations to projects performing science for the public good.