AMD has announced a second round of high-performance technology contributions to assist in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The company is now contributing high-end computing systems or access to Penguin-On-Demand (POD) cloud-based clusters powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC and AMD Radeon Instinct processors to 21 institutions and research facilities conducting COVID-19 research.
With 12 petaflops of total supercomputing capacity now awarded, the combined compute capacity donated through the AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund would rank among the fastest supercomputers in the world according to the most recent Top500 list.
The AMD COVID-19 HPC fund was established to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases.
The second round of AMD-donated compute capacity is expected to be operational starting in Q4 of this year and will be used for a number of pandemic-related workloads including genomics, vaccine development, transmission science, and modeling. Research projects range from evolutionary modeling of the virus, to understanding the virus spike protein activation that occurs prior to first interaction between the coronavirus and human cell, and large scale fluid dynamics simulations of COVID-19 droplets as they travel through the air.
To maximize the impact of the research, AMD is also initiating a working group for COVID-19 HPC Fund recipients and AMD engineers to jointly discuss research areas and findings as well as hardware and software optimizations that can accelerate their collective work.
To date, the AMD COVID-19 HPC fund has donated computing systems or cloud-based computing capacity to the research institutions including CSIR Fourth Paradigm Institute in India.