AMD displays growing adoption in HPC at the Supercomputing Conference 2021

AMD has showcased an expanded presence and growing preference in high-performance computing at this year's Supercomputing Conference 2021.

AMD says that there's been significant adoption across the industry as companies continue to expand their use of AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators.

The company says a growing preference for AMD is showcased in the latest Top500 list. AMD now powers 73 supercomputers, compared to 21 in the November 2020 list, a more than 3x year-over-year increase. AMD powers four out of the top ten most powerful supercomputers in the world and the most powerful supercomputer in EMEA. AMD EPYC 7003 series processors, which launched eight months ago, are used by 17 of the 75 AMD powered supercomputers in the list.

"The demands of supercomputing users have increased exponentially as the world seeks to accelerate research, reducing the time to discovery of valuable information," says AMD senior VP and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group, Forrest Norrod.

"With AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators, we continue to evolve our product offering to push the boundaries of data center technologies, enabling faster research, better outcomes and more impact on the world."

AMD has also been recognised in the annual HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards at SC21. The company won ten awards, including Best Sustainability Innovation in HPC, Best HPC Server Product and the Outstanding Leadership in HPC award presented to president and CEO Dr Lisa Su.

AMD is engaged broadly across the HPC industry with its AMD EPYC and AMD Instinct products, along with the ROCm open ecosystem. Through high-profile installations like the ongoing deployment of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer, AMD says it's bringing the compute technologies and performance needed to support current and future research developments across the world.

Highlights of Frontier and other new HPC systems in the industry include:

• Adastra, an HPE supercomputer that will have two partitions powered by AMD CPUs and accelerators, was recently announced by GENCI, the French national agency for HPC, and CINES, the National Computing Center for Higher Education. The first partition is based on next-generation AMD EPYC processors code-named "Genoa", and the second partition is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators.
• Argonne National Laboratory's "Polaris" testbed supercomputer, powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series processors, enables scientists and developers to tackle a range of AI, engineering and scientific projects.
• A new supercomputer built by HPE using AMD EPYC CPUs to advance weather forecasting and climate research for the National Center of Meteorology in the United Arab Emirates. HPE also updated Eni's supercomputer to accelerate the discovery of energy sources using AMD EPYC processors. 
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory's "Frontier" exascale computer – which is powered by optimised 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI250x accelerators.
• The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin launched Lonestar6, a Dell Technologies supercomputer powered by AMD EPYC 7003 series processors. 
• University of Vermont's Advanced Computing Core, powered by AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators, driving research into COVID-19 and solutions to future potential threats to global health. 
• Washington University's advanced clustering technologies, powered by AMD EPYC processors, studying COVID-19 and home to the Folding@home project.

This year, AMD launched its AMD EPYC 7003 series processor, a high performing server processor. Since then, there has been increased adoption from partners across the industry in various fields, such as biomedicine, predicting natural disasters, clean energy, semiconductors and microelectronics.

Expanding on the features of the EPYC 7003 series processor, AMD recently previewed the 3rd Gen EPYC processor with AMD 3D V-cache. By utilising innovative packaging technology, which layers the L3 cache in EPYC 7003 series processors, AMD 3D V-Cache technology offers enhanced performance for the technical computing workloads prevalent in HPC. Microsoft Azure HPC virtual machines featuring 3rd Gen EPYC with AMD 3D V-Cache are currently available in Private Preview and will be available globally soon.

AMD also unveiled the world's fastest HPC and AI accelerator, AMD Instinct MI250X. Designed with the AMD CDNA 2 architecture, the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators deliver up to 4.9x the peak FP64 performance versus competitive data center accelerators, which is critical for HPC applications like weather modelling. The AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators are also the first to have over 100 GB high-bandwidth memory capacity, delivering up to 3.2 terabytes per second.