AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund Helping Power University Research
AMD have 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 EPYC™ and AMD Radeon Instinct™ processors to 21 institutions and research facilities conducting COVID-19 research, including the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge. 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. 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.
Dr John Marioni, Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute said “The new HPC system provided by AMD will play a key role in helping us learn how our immune systems respond to the new coronavirus and in finding the biomarkers that help predict which patients will go on to develop severe disease. This information would be instrumental for managing and treating new patients effectively, and will also inform research into new or existing drugs that can target COVID-19. Cambridge University thanks AMD for their generous support of this important research.”
Alan Lee, Corporate Vice President and Head of Research at AMD said “AMD is excited to join with the University of Cambridge in the global fight against disease and pandemics, like Covid-19, that impact so many people worldwide. The contribution of AMD compute power is just the beginning of the journey and we are happy to do our part to help make the research teams at the University of Cambridge successful.”
