Friday, April 17th 2020
AMD Donates $15 Million Worth EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct Accelerators to aid COVID-19 Research
AMD on April 15 updated its COVID-19 response strategy to include a sizable donation of enterprise hardware from its inventory towards COVID-19 vaccine research. The company is giving away $15 million worth HPCs cloud computing nodes powered by EPYC enterprise processors and Radeon Instinct scalar compute accelerators to key research institutions at the forefront of vaccine research for COVID-19. AMD says that these systems will be of a turnkey nature, so they could be quickly deployed and put to use. The company invites any institution conducting COVID-19 related research to contact them for access to the node.
Making the announcement, CEO Dr. Lisa Su writes: "AMD is announcing today a COVID-19 HPC fund to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. The fund will include an initial donation of $15 million of high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions. To ease the implementation and speed the useful impact from these donations, we are working with our HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes. Research institutions should contact AMD at COVID-19HPC[at]amd[dot]com to submit proposals for access to these nodes."
Source:
AMD
Making the announcement, CEO Dr. Lisa Su writes: "AMD is announcing today a COVID-19 HPC fund to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. The fund will include an initial donation of $15 million of high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions. To ease the implementation and speed the useful impact from these donations, we are working with our HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes. Research institutions should contact AMD at COVID-19HPC[at]amd[dot]com to submit proposals for access to these nodes."
46 Comments on AMD Donates $15 Million Worth EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct Accelerators to aid COVID-19 Research
Write api, make ecosystem, get used to Radeon MI. The donation will pay off...
They also offer consulting and support to researchers.
Everyone is using Nvidia GPUs already. Giving a few away wouldn't help that much.
PS: their relief supplies, I mean.
:D :roll:
"AMD Donates $15 Million Worth EYPC CPUs and Radeon Instinct Accelerators to aid COVID-19 Research"
Thank you and have a good day!
parabricks seems targeted and limited to specific people with powerful nvidia gpus?
Occasionally you see someone who still mixes Zen and Ryzen generations... It's for research institutions using GPGPU for genome sequencing.
Limited group: yes. But the group that matters right now. The vaccin to this virus won't be developed by a tiny, budget-limited, non-profit institution.
What AMD did is a nice marketing idea that will give them some good press among gamers (just look around). I assume it also lets them dump some Radeon Instinct inventory from the books.
But specialized research entities already have GPUs - the ones made by Nvidia.
What makes a difference is providing support, optimizations and software that will make research easier and faster. And Nvidia does exactly that. Has been doing for years.
Just to put that $15M into perspective.
There's a really big computer called Summit. Maybe you've heard of it?
It costed $200M, runs 27648 Nvidia V100.
At this moment big part of Summit runs SARS-related load. Similar to many other supercomputers, cloud, private clusters in pharma companies and distributed computing networks.
$15M worth of hardware really doesn't change much.
AMD could do something smart instead. For example: set up distributed computing on consoles. There are probably around 100M PS4/Xbox One gathering dust most of the day.
Don't play dice with ur lives.
Great move from AMD :) Works in more ways than just dumping $15m of hardware... hopefully they'll get 100x+ back from peoples experiences with them etc...
You know - it's just in case someone thinks that: oh yeah, now we finally have the systems that will find the cure!
Earlier this month there was another topic about AMD joining the COVID-19 HPC Consortium. I said back then that AMD's role in this is difficult to understand - they don't run servers and they don't offer research support.
I just checked. The Consorium isn't sure as well:
covid19-hpc-consortium.org/
Bottom section of this page - Nvidia is mentioned as an HPC and research expert. AMD isn't mentioned at all.
Also, you have people here attacking Nvidia and Intel (totally off topic), but somehow you're only reacting to me, because I ruined your AMD-love camp. :)
Edit:
And I know you're intelligent. You should be able to manage something better.