Research has evolved over the years. More and more, we are dealing with theoretical models and simulations that vastly change our understanding of the world around us. In fact, these models have spurred some of the innovations and breakthroughs that have been and continue to change the face of many industries. However, one of the biggest challenges in achieving these breakthroughs is access to high-performance computing. With limited stipends and funds, researchers have found themselves unable to afford dedicated high-performance computing machines. AMD has been addressing that with their High Performance Compute Fund.
What initially started as a means to drive timely breakthroughs in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic is now being expanded to more applications. Keeping with the social impact factor of research, the HPC Fund is being expanded to include more fields in medical research and social good. The expansion will, hopefully, drive more breakthroughs in various fields for the betterment of the global society.
In addition to the expansion of its scope, AMD’s recent acquisition of Xilinx is also expanding the technology offered in the program. In addition to access to AMD’s EPYC Processors and Instinct Accelerators, researchers will now be able to make use of the Xilinx Heterogeneous Accelerated Compute Clusters (HACC). This gives them access to Xilinx ALveo accelerators and Xilinx Versal ACAPs. The newly integrated technologies expand the potential applications and decrease the time needed to run complex models.
As of May 2022, AMD has contributed over 20 petaflops of computing capacity through the High Performance Compute Fund. That’s over USD$31 million in monetary value. Researchers in over 28 institutions in eight countries have benefitted from the HPC Fund. Access has been extended to nearly 6,000 researchers resulting in 55 published research papers covering key issues including the disparities in COVID-19 Vaccination rates by race and ethnicity and improvements in the classification of breast cancer imagery using deep vision techniques.
This includes the National University of Singapore (NUS) where AMD has donated AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct Accelerators to the School of Computing. According to Eric Han, a fourth year PhD student at NUS Computing, “We are studying highly complex Machine Learning techniques that require us to run multiple compute and memory-intensive experiments. The AMD cluster has a high core count with large RAM, allowing us to run multiple experiments across the cluster.”
AMD is granting cloud-based access to universities and research institutions around the world with support from leading system partners Supermicro and WEKA.io. Applications are now being accepted. Research institutions and universities can apply for the new round of computing power grants by submitting their application on their official HPC Fund Website.
