AMD is using some of its most powerful tech to beat Covid-19

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD and Penguin Computing have announced that they had teamed up with leading US universities for a supercomputing research project that will study the SARS-CoV-2 virus as well as the COVID-19 disease.  

Under the terms of the deal, AMD and Penguin Computing will provide access to an HPC cluster located at Penguin to researchers from MIT, NYU, and Rice. The researchers are expected to use the supercomputer for pandemic-related workloads, such as genomics, vaccine development, transmission science, and modeling.

The supercomputer cluster is based on Gigabyte’s G291-Z20 compute nodes that are powered by AMD’s EPYC 7642 processor paired with eight Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerators. The HPC cluster also uses Gigabyte’s R182-Z91 management nodes powered by two 16-core AMD EPYC 7302 processors.

COVID-19 research

“High performance computing technology plays a critical role in modern viral research, deepening our understanding of how specific viruses work and ultimately accelerating the development of potential therapeutics and vaccines,” said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD.  “AMD and our technology partners are proud to provide researchers around the world with these new systems that will increase the computing capability available to fight COVID-19 and support future medical research.” 

AMD is about to launch its third-generation EPYC processors as well as its first CDNA architecture-based Radeon Instinct accelerators in the coming months.

Source: AMD

Anton Shilov is the News Editor at AnandTech, Inc. For more than four years, he has been writing for magazines and websites such as AnandTech, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Kit Guru, EE Times, Tech & Learning, EE Times Asia, Design & Reuse.