Nov. 16, 2020 — As part of the AMD-COVID-19 HPC Fund supporting global research teams fighting against COVID-19 pandemic, chipmaker AMD has just announced a second phase of donation of computing resources to 21 institutions and international academic sites. In France, GENCI and Inria were chosen to receive the solution offered by AMD.

The donation with a computing capacity of over half a petaflop/s (FP64), will be provided in the form of a complete cluster of hybrid compute nodes equipped with AMD Radeon Instinct MI50 GPUs and 2nd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs. With this donation, AMD wishes to accelerate the efforts already undertaken by GENCI and Inria against COVID-19.

“GENCI and its partner Inria are delighted and honored to receive AMD’s donation to help researchers continue their fight against COVID-19,” jointly declared Philippe Lavocat, CEO of GENCI and Jean-Frédéric Gerbeau, Deputy CEO for Science at Inria.

Since March 2020, GENCI has made available to researchers fighting against Covid-19, its national and European resources (through PRACE) in HPC, AI and data storage (Occigen, Joliot-Curie and Jean Zay supercomputers).

To date, more than 40 global research projects on COVID-19, ranging from epidemiologic studies, process of virus replication inside our cells, massive screening of molecules to high precision CFD simulations of the spread of droplets have benefited from computing hours and support by GENCI.

Similarly, Inria set up from march 2020 an internal mission to support the launch of some thirty projects against COVID-19, in cooperation with stakeholders in the health crisis (clinicians, epidemiologists, hospitals, public authorities). Some of these projects have implemented Artificial Intelligence methods requiring significant computing resources (deep learning for the analysis of chest imaging, automatic processing of medical reports, etc.).

The AMD system, which will be integrated into the national GRID’5000/SILECS infrastructure on the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon site, will be accessible to users of the French scientific research community with preparatory access beginning of 2021. It will make available 10 2nd Gen AMD EPYC single-socket nodes, each configured with 8 Radeon MI50 GPUs, or 80 Radeon MI50 GPUs in total, interconnected by an Infiniband HDR network. Installation and configuration support will be provided by Penguin Computing in cooperation with Inria.

“We are proud to be partnering with GENCI and Inria to help equip researchers with the technology needed to fight COVID-19,” said Mario Silveira, Corporate VP EMEA and Managing Director, AMD France. “With the power of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors and Radeon MI50 GPUs, the French scientific research community will be able to run multiple simulations with a superior foundation for their work.”

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Source: GENCI