SC’19 - UK’s fastest new supercomputer powered by AMD

PRESS RELEASE

At SC’19 AMD showcased how it is paving the foundation for the HPC industry, through CPUs, GPUs and open source software, to enter into the exascale era. It did this with new wins based on EPYC, new Cloud instances powered by EPYC, the launch of ROCm 3.0 building out the Exascale software stack, and the first AMD EPYC processor-based system to join the TOP500 list.

• The U.K.’s fastest new supercomputer is powered by 2^nd Gen EPYC processors, ARCHER2 
• The U.K. Atomic Weapons Establishment’s new Vulcan supercomputer, also powered by 2^nd Gen EPYC processors
• Atos, is supplying two BullSequana XH2000 supercomputers based on 2^nd Gen EPYC to Météo-France for operational weather forecasting and research in atmospheric, ocean and climate sciences.
• The German weather forecasting service, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), is using 2^nd Gen EPYC processors in conjunction with NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA vector engines

New customers using AMD EPYC for HPC include:

• San Diego Supercomputer Center for the Expanse supercomputer, a 5-petaflop system powered by Dell EMC Power Edge systems and 2^nd Gen EPYC
• ETH Zurich, picked the EPYC 7742 for its performance and price/performance capabilities, as well as its ability to run well known HPC applications and software

EPYC Joins TOP500 List

• The French high-performance computing organisation, GENCI, announced the latest extension of the Joliot-Curie supercomputer based on the ATOS BullSequana XH2000 joined the 54^th edition of the TOP500 using the EPYC 7H12 processor

AMD leads the way in taking supercomputing to the cloud.

• The Azure HBv2 virtual machines for HPC based on EPYC 7742 processors provide customers with 120 non-hyperthreaded cores, up to 45% more memory bandwidth than x86 alternatives, up to 4 teraFLOPS of double-precision compute and the cloud’s first deployment of 200 Gigabit HDR InfiniBand from Mellanox
• AWS announced the upcoming availability of Amazon EC2 instances based on 2^nd Gen EPYC, the C5a, C5ad, and bare-metal versions EC2 C5an.metal and C5adn.metal. The bare metal versions will have 192 logical processors on 96 physical cores, which will be twice the largest instance size offered in the EC2 compute-optimised instance family.

AMD Builds Exascale Software Stack with ROCm 3.0

• New innovations to support HIP-clang - a compiler built upon LLVM, improved CUDA conversion capability with hipify-clang, library optimisations for both HPC and ML.
• ROCm upstream integration into leading TensorFlow and PyTorch

Existing customers using AMD EPYC

• The U.K.’s fastest new supercomputer powered by 2^nd Gen EPYC processors, ARCHER2 
• The U.K. Atomic Weapons Establishment’s new Vulcan supercomputer, also powered by 2^nd Gen EPYC processors
• Atos, is supplying two BullSequana XH2000 supercomputers based on 2^nd Gen EPYC to Météo-France for operational weather forecasting and research in atmospheric, ocean and climate sciences.
• The German weather forecasting service, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), is using 2^nd Gen EPYC processors in conjunction with NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA vector engines

An Update on AMD EPYC and HPC Applications:

• Read more about how AMD EPYC performs on specific HPC applications like WRF and ANSYS Fluent in this blog from Raghu Nambiar, CVP & CTO of Datacenter Ecosystems & Application Engineering for AMD

PCIe 4.0 Ecosystem Grows

• PCIe 4.0 products supporting 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC on demonstration at SC19
• The Broadcom Thor NIC for 200 GB ethernet
• Mellanox’s ConnectX-6 NIC showing ~400 GB/s InfiniBand performance
• Samsung and its Gen4 PM1733 NVME SSD – Showcasing 2x of IOPS over the Samsung Gen3 SSD
• The Xilinx Alveo U50, U280 FPGAs 

A Growing Hardware Ecosystem

• GIGABYTE announced four new G-Series GPU servers that support 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors, with one supporting up to eight PCIe 4.0 GPU cards, giving customers great “AMD + AMD” options for a range of accelerated computing workloads.
• The world-record shattering HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 and DL385 Gen10 servers are joined by new Gen10 Plus models significantly enhancing performance and efficiency for vital workloads like virtualisation, HPC and Big Data.
• With the new Penguin Altus^® XE4218GT, supporting up to 8 GPUs, Penguin customers have an “AMD + AMD” solution that uses the PCIe 4.0 support in the 2^nd Gen EPYC and Radeon Instinct MI50 to power machine learning, big data analytics, and similar workloads.
• Tyan also announced new platforms in its HPC-focused Transport HX product line and database-focused Transport SX product line powered by 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors.