AMD Donates $15M of EPYC Processing Power To Fight Coronavirus

By Zhiye Liu
published

EPYC takes the fight to coronavirus.

(Image credit: AMD)

Having recently joined the COVID-19 HPC Consortium (opens in new tab), AMD has created a $15 million COVID-19 HPC fund to equip research institutions with the necessary computing power to find a cure for coronavirus and other diseases.

Research institutions will receive the best of what AMD has to offer – high-performance systems that leverage the chipmaker's core-heavy EPYC processors (opens in new tab) and speedy Radeon Instinct (opens in new tab) accelerators. To facilitate the implementation process, AMD is working hand-in-hand with its HPC partners to provide a simple and easy solution to install the HPC nodes.

AMD is also contributing to the "Corona” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The chipmaker will supply Radeon Instinct MI50 (opens in new tab) accelerators to fuel the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. AMD estimates that the provided resources deliver almost double the peak system performance, offering extra computing power for molecular modeling.

Access to AMD's nodes is pretty straightforward as research institutiones only have to hit the chipmaker up at COVID-19HPC@amd.com to submit their proposals. Additionally, researchers can also submit their proposals directly to the consortium through the online portal (opens in new tab). Subsequently, the consortium will evaluate and decide how much computing resources it can provide for the project.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

Topics
CPUs
5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Nemesia
    Not bad. That's like 3 EPYC CPU's. :)
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Nemesia said:
    Not bad. That's like 3 EPYC CPU's. :)
    Awww... that's hardly fair when you look at Xeon pricing.

    I was expecting jokes more along the lines that "demand for Radeon Instinct accelerators is so low they have to give them away!"

    ** crickets chirping **
    Anyway, good for AMD. I hope it helps.
    Reply
  • Nemesia
    bit_user said:
    Awww... that's hardly fair when you look at Xeon pricing.

    I was expecting jokes more along the lines that "demand for Radeon Instinct accelerators is so low they have to give them away!"

    ** crickets chirping **
    Anyway, good for AMD. I hope it helps.

    Hahaha. I love the EPYC of course. It's amazing what they did.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    So is this them sending out hardware or them offering cloud computing time?
    It's not really made clear by the wording.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TerryLaze said:
    So is this them sending out hardware or them offering cloud computing time?
    It's not really made clear by the wording.
    My read is that AMD is offering to give away $15M worth of equipment, either directly or through the COVID-19 HPC Consortium. I don't really get the point of having two avenues, but whatever.

    Also, if AMD hosts any sort of cloud computing service, that'd be news to me. Nvidia does, however.
    Reply