At AMD, we are excited to celebrate Exascale Day along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, as our research and development teams are hard at work to change the world of computing with the groundbreaking Frontier supercomputer.
Frontier is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer of all time when it goes live, with an expected performance upwards of 1.5 exaFLOPS, or 1.5 billion, billion calculations per second. Powered by AMD EPYC™ CPUs, Radeon™ Instinct GPUs, Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) and EPYC open source software, Frontier targets more than five times faster performance than the world’s current reigning fastest supercomputer.
We are optimizing AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs in a 4:1 GPU to CPU configuration which will allow us to achieve high throughput of data. AMD’s Infinity Fabric will support high-speed connections between processors and allow Frontier to hit historic, sustained high-performance computation across the system.
As we approach and pass the barrier of exascale computing, the Frontier supercomputer opens up new possibilities for scientific research. Oak Ridge National Labs, Cray and AMD have created the Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program to develop applications designed for problems which only Frontier can help solve:
- Princeton University: to simulate future states of the Milky Way galaxy using massive amounts of satellite and telescope data in an astrophysical simulation code called Cholla.
- ORNL: to use a codebase known as Combinatorial Metrics (CoMet) to study the genetics of opioid addiction and toxicity, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, and autism.
- Georgia Institute of Technology: to run GPUs for Extreme-Scale Turbulence Simulations (GESTS) to simulate turbulence with nearly 35 trillion grid points in order to better understand fluid turbulence as it relates to pollution, ocean currents and astrophysics.
- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: to study the Lattice Boltzmann Methods of Porous Media (LBPM) code to understand the volumetric maps of mineral composition in order to train neural networks to predict future geometric configuration of fluids.
- ORNL: to run calculations of realistic condensed matters from first principles (FP) calculations, previously inaccessible before Frontier, through the Locally Self-Consistent Multiple Scattering (LSMS)
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: to use Frontier in conjunction with codebase Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD) to understand viruses like Zika and pave the way for new drugs and vaccines to prevent future outbreaks.
- Michigan State University: to study complex-time dependent phenomena at the particle level such as nuclear reactions and fission through symmetry-projection techniques on a code called Nuclear Coupled-Cluster Oak Ridge (NuCCOR).
- University of Delaware: to develop advanced particle accelerators for radiation therapy of cancer, high energy physics, and photon science using code Particle-in-cell on Graphics Processing Units (PIConGPU).
This list inspires the work we do every day, as it takes the millions of hours of work that has gone into the latest AMD processors and brings it to life in tangible ways that will truly change the future. AMD is proud to be at the forefront of innovation and discovery through our collaboration with Cray and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Working together with these exceptional technology partners and the researchers Frontier aims to empower, we can redefine the future of high-performance data centers and have a profound effect on advancing science and technology.
Cautionary Statement
This blog contains forward-looking statements concerning Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) including, but not limited to, the expectations and benefits of the Frontier supercomputer, which are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are commonly identified by words such as "would," "may," "expects," "believes," "plans," "intends," "projects" and other terms with similar meaning. Investors are cautioned that the forward-looking statements in this blog are based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations, speak only as of the date of this blog and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. Such statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond AMD's control, that could cause actual results and other future events to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by, the forward-looking information and statements. Investors are urged to review in detail the risks and uncertainties in AMD's Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including but not limited to AMD's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 29, 2019.
