AMD COVID-19 HPC Fund Adds 18 Institutions and Five Petaflops of Supercomputer Processing Power to Assist Researchers Fighting COVID-19 Pandemic

— High performance AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs to power COVID-19 focused research at Stanford School of Medicine, The University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, University of Toronto and other institutions across the U.S., Europe, and India —

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced a second round of high-performance technology contributions to assist in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. AMD is now contributing high-end computing systems or access to Penguin-On-Demand (POD) cloud-based clusters powered by 2^nd 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.

“AMD is proud to be working with leading global research institutions to bring the power of high performance computing technology to the fight against the coronavirus pandemic,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer, AMD. “These donations of AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct processors will help researchers not only deepen their understanding of COVID-19, but also help improve our ability to respond to future potential threats to global health.”

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. In addition to the donations of $15 million of high-performance computing systems, AMD has contributed technology and technical resources to nearly double the peak system of the “Corona” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which is being used to provide additional computing power for molecular modeling in support of COVID-19 research.

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.