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
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alufan - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
well done AMD pity others dont seem to be following suit, the F@H guys are doing really well, now if we could only convince all the worlds major pc owners whose work systems are probably sat idle whilst folks work from home to leverage the unused systems to the same it would be truly massiveOperandi - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
IBM World Community Grid (BOINC) have a a COVID project running too. As well as other medical research and climate science projects.ZipSpeed - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
Yup, Rosetta@home is also participating. Friendly reminder to everyone that TeAm Anandtech participates on all the projects listed above. We will always welcome new contributions!edzieba - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
"pity others dont seem to be following suit"Ahem:
https://developer.nvidia.com/research/covid-19
https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/corporat...
https://newsroom.ibm.com/COVID-19#science-and-rese...
https://news.microsoft.com/covid-19-response/
etc.
Nvidia also appear to be running F@H themselves on SaturnV: https://stats.foldingathome.org/donors
Jorgp2 - Monday, September 14, 2020 - link
But that doesn't fit into his imaginary world.alufan - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
Facts am calling out these so called supercomputing giants yes they have done a lot but they could do a lot more all of themSpunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
For someone talking about "imaginary worlds", you sure didn't bother reading any of those links 😏alufan - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
The Intel page is nothing more than an AD for Intels "powerful supercomputing" AMD gave stuff away for free to anyone that can use it meaningfullyNvidia has donated zip they just have a waffle page showing how good they are at enabling folks to research and work from home.
IBM have donated Machine time but if you look at the page its really all about pushing the image of IBM as a solutions provider but kudos for the donation
Microsoft also has donated and to be honest with the Gates initiatives always has but Gates is no longer connected officially to MS
So maybe we should look at the actual donation not just at the fluffing on the page.
Of course all these institutions AMD included are doing this for PR dont get the impression am not aware of that but AMD has so far given away server equipment that can be used as well as donations to Medical groups across the world not just time on servers which of course also needed by many and in itself expensive
All the above companies belong to the HPC consortium including AMD
edzieba - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
"So maybe we should look at the actual donation not just at the fluffing on the page."OK then, if you only want to cash donations and want to ignore hardware donations or compute time donations:
AMD: $1m (https://www.anandtech.com/show/15731/amd-covid19-h...
Intel: $6m (https://www.anandtech.com/show/15731/amd-covid19-h...
Nvidia: $10.6m (though does not break out employee matched donations: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/csr/our-response-to-c...
The majority of donations from tech companies has been tech (hardware or compute time) rather than cash.
Spunjji - Tuesday, September 15, 2020 - link
lol - I posted much the same rant back at edzieba, then saw you'd already done it. Oh well :D