AMD Donates $15 Million Worth EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct Accelerators to aid COVID-19 Research

[btarunr]

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."



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[noel_fs]

i wonder what nvidia will do

 

[zo0lykas]

nvidia already done ages ago ) with software you can share your cpu and gpu, to help research "vaccin" from covid19

i wonder what nvidia will do

 

[Ferrum Master]

Bold move.

Write api, make ecosystem, get used to Radeon MI. The donation will pay off...

 

[notb]

i wonder what nvidia will do

Coronavirus Researchers: 90 Day Access to Parabricks

NVIDIA is giving Coronavirus Researchers Access to Parabricks for 90 Days. Learn more.

blogs.nvidia.com

They also offer consulting and support to researchers.

Everyone is using Nvidia GPUs already. Giving a few away wouldn't help that much.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Coronavirus Researchers: 90 Day Access to Parabricks

NVIDIA is giving Coronavirus Researchers Access to Parabricks for 90 Days. Learn more.

blogs.nvidia.com

They also offer consulting and support to researchers.

Everyone is using Nvidia GPUs already. Giving a few away wouldn't help that much.

Yeah, for any budget limited, public/non-profit institution that worries about every dollar and how they're going to operate from year to year, saving $5000 on a single GPU (while Nvidia's paying substantially less than half that in cost as we all know they have some of the largest profit margins in the industry) or $20,000 on just four GPUs would never, ever make a difference.

 

[HossHuge]

I hope this goes to a trustworthy group to help.

 

[TheDeeGee]

nvidia already done ages ago ) with software you can share your cpu and gpu, to help research "vaccin" from covid19

Nvidia will donate fake leather jackets.

 

[mtcn77]

Nvidia will donate fake leather jackets.

Imagine they started a bidding race and then department of energy got involved and outbid them all...
PS: their relief supplies, I mean.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

Doctor D2G at your service! I'm doing the research when do I get my machine??

 

[Turmania]

Everything counts even little things in our fight against the Virus.

 

[mstenholm]

i wonder what nvidia will do

Nvidia Saturn V. I think that they still own it. It started folding when Corvid-19 jobs came along. https://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/individual_list.php?s=&srt=2

 

[95Viper]

Please stay on topic.
"AMD Donates $15 Million Worth EYPC CPUs and Radeon Instinct Accelerators to aid COVID-19 Research"

Thank you and have a good day!

 

[xtreemchaos]

well done AMD thats the spirit every bit helps.

 

[natr0n]

Intel should provide the cold weather people with free heat with there latest offerings.

 

[noel_fs]

nvidia already done ages ago ) with software you can share your cpu and gpu, to help research "vaccin" from covid19

thats what folding@home is for.
parabricks seems targeted and limited to specific people with powerful nvidia gpus?

 

[ASOT]

Yes.. Go AMD FTW

 

[Landcross]

Surprises me nobody so far has noticed that the title says 'EYPC' instead of EPYC

 

[Dave65]

And Intel donates Oh wait.

 

[notb]

Surprises me nobody so far has noticed that the title says 'EYPC' instead of EPYC

I did, but I assume this is a new norm among AMD fans: mock Intel's * Lakes, but make mistakes in AMD naming whenever possible.
Occasionally you see someone who still mixes Zen and Ryzen generations...

parabricks seems targeted and limited to specific people with powerful nvidia gpus?

It's for research institutions using GPGPU for genome sequencing.
Limited group: yes. But the group that matters right now.

Yeah, for any budget limited, public/non-profit institution that worries about every dollar and how they're going to operate from year to year, saving $5000 on a single GPU (while Nvidia's paying substantially less than half that in cost as we all know they have some of the largest profit margins in the industry) or $20,000 on just four GPUs would never, ever make a difference.

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.

 

[mtcn77]

Today is the first day I've heard a ryzen laptop tv ad, so there is that.
Don't play dice with ur lives.

 

[phill]

And I wonder when TPU will be getting its Eypc and Radeon setups through the post??? Any idea's guys??

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...

 

[moproblems99]

So AMD manages to give stuff away and people shit on them and says nVidia does everything better? I see some people really reach for the Stars.

 

[notb]

So AMD manages to give stuff away and people shit on them and says nVidia does everything better? I see some people really reach for the Stars.

No. AMD gives stuff away, which is a nice gesture but really not that significant for the actual situation that we're in right now. So, because you overestimate it, I gave some reference. You feel hurt or what?
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:

COVID-19 HPC Consortium

The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is a private-public effort to bring free compute time and resources on their world-class machines.

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.

 

[mtcn77]

they don't run servers and they don't offer research support.

Well, they offer 'turn-key systems', a.k.a You must have managed to gloss over that.