One component to the latest pandemic has been the variety of organizations banding collectively to unite for particular analysis into SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. We are in an period now the place lots of computing energy will help direct bodily analysis into potential vaccines, or assist analyse fascinating molecular energetic websites to spur additional analysis. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium is one instance of this, with 25 energetic merchandise, 31 members, and roughly 418 PetaFLOPs of compute energy – that is in comparison with the world #1 supercomputer, Summit, which has solely round a 3rd to a half of this processing energy. The newest information is that AMD is establishing a singular COVID-19 fund to offer extra computing assets the place they’re wanted most.
The fund will initially begin with a $15 million USD donation of techniques powered by EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs to some key analysis establishments. Those establishments concerned about getting access to this {hardware} must contact the fund (COVID-19HPC@amd.com) with proposals, and it seems that AMD will present techniques on a meritorious foundation. AMD can also be set to contribute assets to the ‘Corona’ system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, separate to the fund, with the intention to double the height system efficiency there. AMD can also be donating $1m to quite a lot of different funds to assist in efforts, along with medical gear, worker donation matching, and prioritizing shipments of embedded processors to be used in medical gear equivalent to ventilators.
Other tech corporations with important donations to COVID help embrace Intel who has supplied a million protecting objects for healthcare, $6m for Coronavirus aid, $40m in studying initiatives, $10m to assist accomplice and employee-led initiatives, and additionally opened up a few of its IP to researchers and scientists. Xilinx has donated $1.1m, cut up between a number of funds together with the WHO and closer-to-home funds. Qualcomm has donated an undisclosed quantity to a number of funds, together with supplying laptops and gadgets to varsities and non-profits tackling the difficulty.
For compute, Alibaba is providing cloud companies to COVID-19 analysis freed from cost, whereas Amazon’s AWS, NVIDIA, and VMWare and is donating unused GPU compute time to assist Folding@Home. The NVIDIA one is fascinating, as evidently they’ve put the Saturn V supercomputer, consisting of 125 DGX-1 nodes, onto the issue. The total of the Folding@Home processing energy is now north of two.5 ExaFLOPs, regardless of solely hitting the 1 ExaFLOP barrier simply over two weeks in the past. RIKEN’s new supercomputer, Fugaku, in Japan, was set to be totally put in by 2021, nonetheless the portion that’s presently constructed is now being made out there to researchers who can use the assets.
The COVID-19 High Performance Consortium is presently the most important fruits of off-site compute assets for researchers that want time on supercomputers. XSEDE’s web site has a information for researchers to submit proposals for compute time.
