AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund Adds 18 Institutions and Five Petaflops of Processing Power

AMD has 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.

“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,” says 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 for 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 various pandemic-related workloads including genomics, vaccine development, transmission science and modeling. 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.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.