AMD has demonstrated momentum for its AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators across the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry.
The company has also outlined updates to the ROCm open software platform and introduced the AMD Instinct Education and Research (AIER) initiative.
The latest Top500 list showcased the continued growth of AMD EPYC processors for HPC systems.
AMD EPYC processors power nearly five-times more systems compared to the June 2020 list, and more than double the number of systems compared to November 2020.
AMD EPYC processors also power half of the 58 new entries on the June 2021 list.
“High performance computing is critical to addressing the world’s biggest and most important challenges,” says Forrest Norrod, senior vice-president and GM: data centre and embedded systems group at AMD.
“With our AMD EPYC processor family and Instinct accelerators, AMD continues to be the partner of choice for HPC. We are committed to enabling the performance and capabilities needed to advance scientific discoveries, break the exascale barrier, and continue driving innovation.”
A 2020 Intersect360 perception study of HPC users’ impressions of CPUs showed that AMD EPYC processors had a 78% favourable impression amongst respondents, growing from 36% in 2016.
In a 2021 study from Intersect360 asking HPC institutions about AMD EPYC penetration within their sites, 23% of respondents said they have broad usage of AMD EPYC processors, and an additional 47% said they are testing or using AMD EPYC processors at some level.”
AMD is also introducing its new AMD Instinct Education and Research (AIER) initiative, designed to help scientists, researchers and academics accelerate the performance of their code on AMD Instinct Accelerators. The AIER initiative, based on member requirements, offers remote access to AMD Instinct technologies, the AMD ROCm Learning Centre, and ROCm software and support as well as access to technical guidance on AMD software and hardware solutions.
In addition to regional Solution Partners, AIER Global Solution Partners include Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Supermicro.
The ROCm open software platform continues to gain industry support and momentum with a growing list of applications, third-party libraries, and frameworks supporting AMD accelerators.
The HPC community has embraced HIP as a heterogenous programming model, that developers use to write or adapt their codes to for acceleration on AMD’s GPUs including Gromacs, TensorFlow, and GridTools.
Additionally, PyTorch for ROCm is now available as an installable Python package and includes full capability for mixed-precision and large-scale training using AMD’s MIOpen and RCCL (communications) libraries. This innovation provides a new option for data scientists, researchers, students, and others in the community to get started with accelerated PyTorch using AMD GPUs.
Most recently, CuPy, an open-source array library with Python, has expanded its traditional GPU support with the introduction of version 9.0 that now offers support for the ROCm stack for GPU-accelerated computing.
Last year, AMD announced its HPC Fund for COVID-19 research, which included a donation of systems powered by AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators to provide researchers with petaflop-scale compute power to fight the pandemic.
With over 12 petaflops of capacity awarded to-date, AMD has since delivered HPC capabilities to 23 institutions across seven countries including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), New York University (NYU), Rice University, University of Texas at Austin and University of Toronto.