Sunday, November 16th 2014
AMD Awarded $32 Million for 'Extreme Scale' High-Performance Computing Research
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that for the third straight year it was awarded research grants for development of critical technologies needed for extreme-scale computing in conjunction with projects associated with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development Program, known as "FastForward 2."
The two DOE awards, totaling more than $32 million, will fund research focused on exascale applications for AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) based on the open-standard Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), as well as future memory systems to power a generation of exascale supercomputers capable of delivering 30-60 times more performance than today's fastest supercomputers.
FastForward 2 is a jointly-funded collaboration between DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) focused on initiating partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the research and development of critical technologies needed to enable exascale computing. Specifically, the FastForward 2 research grants awarded to AMD are for:
The DOE strategic plan seeks to address the nation's most pressing scientific challenges by advancing simulation-based scientific discovery made possible by the world's highest performing exascale supercomputers. The technologies developed as part of this initiative could positively impact low-power embedded, cloud/datacenter and mid-range high-performance computing applications for diverse fields ranging from medical science to astrophysics and climate modeling. FastForward 2 investments will result in an increase in DOE's ability to leverage commercial developments for future systems.
AMD Opteron compute processors and AMD FirePro graphics processors are used today in many of the world's leading supercomputers.
The two DOE awards, totaling more than $32 million, will fund research focused on exascale applications for AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) based on the open-standard Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), as well as future memory systems to power a generation of exascale supercomputers capable of delivering 30-60 times more performance than today's fastest supercomputers.
FastForward 2 is a jointly-funded collaboration between DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) focused on initiating partnerships with multiple companies to accelerate the research and development of critical technologies needed to enable exascale computing. Specifically, the FastForward 2 research grants awarded to AMD are for:
- Node Architecture: AMD will conduct research for an integrated exascale node architecture based on its HSA-enabled APUs. Particular areas of research include power efficiency, reliability, programmability, component and network interface integration, APU microarchitecture, advanced memory architectures and efficient data movement.
- Memory Technology: AMD will collaborate with the DOE and others to help define a new standard for memory interfaces that meets the needs of future-generation memory devices, including non-volatile memory and processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures.
The DOE strategic plan seeks to address the nation's most pressing scientific challenges by advancing simulation-based scientific discovery made possible by the world's highest performing exascale supercomputers. The technologies developed as part of this initiative could positively impact low-power embedded, cloud/datacenter and mid-range high-performance computing applications for diverse fields ranging from medical science to astrophysics and climate modeling. FastForward 2 investments will result in an increase in DOE's ability to leverage commercial developments for future systems.
AMD Opteron compute processors and AMD FirePro graphics processors are used today in many of the world's leading supercomputers.
13 Comments on AMD Awarded $32 Million for 'Extreme Scale' High-Performance Computing Research
Lets hope it goes to something worthwhile.
I think what DoE is looking for is Mangycores and similar technologies where they pack as much data execution into one package as possible. I can't see APUs+GPUs being the future of supercomputing.
The "node architecture" sounds stupid. That is, HSA is already done and it is already mature. No research grants should be awarded to AMD for this and I'd argue AMD is in no position to address "memory technology" unless there's some prototype they revealed that I missed.
Alas, 32million isn't much to be sure in the grand scheme of things but it will help.
AMD needs to go back to the drawing board and fix their latency issues in the CPU, Its pitiful when separate components outperform a singular solution due to the inherent issues, for example a i3 and equal AMD GPU outperforms APU's, even though the APU is all on die in CPU bound cases, and in many GPU bound.
AMD really needs to do something about how god awful their CPU's really are.
BTW excavator is on the way... but who knows...
www.techpowerup.com/195355/vishera-end-of-the-line-for-amd-fx-cpus-roadmap.html
And the FX are not awful. They're pretty good for what they offer. There's the argument about power consumption but if you don't keep your PC on 24/7 I think you could use it for years before having a noticeable impact on your power bill.