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Sweden’s KTH Turns to AMD Instinct™ Acceleration For Next Era of Discovery

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kth dardel image.png

By Guy Ludden, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for AMD Instinct Accelerators at AMD

KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, one of Sweden’s largest technical universities dedicated to science and engineering research, recently announced that it is building a new supercomputer that will take full advantage of AMD HPC solutions to accelerate discoveries for science and industry. Phase two of the HPE system deployment named Dardel will feature next-gen AMD Instinct™ accelerators to deliver an expected additional 10+ Petaflop of compute performance. This comes on top of the over 65,000 AMD EPYC™ cores that will be deployed in phase one. In all the system will deliver a total theoretical performance of a remarkable 13.5 Petaflops.

 

Prof. Hans Karlsson, the Director of Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing which is leading the funding of the project said, “In recent times, we have seen a dramatic increase in the extent to which researchers need to use accelerators (mainly in the form of GPUs). We will soon be able to meet that demand through the accelerator partition in Dardel.” Karlsson concluded, “Dardel will significantly increase the Swedish capacity for research that requires access to large-scale computational resources."

 

Named for Swedish author and journalist Thora Dardel and her first husband, post-impressionist painter Nils Dardel, the system will be installed on the KTH campus at the PDC Center for High Performance Computing. The system will help Swedish researchers tackle challenging research areas, including computational fluid dynamics, biophysics, and quantum chemistry, that are used in R&D supporting Swedish companies across the manufacturing, automotive and transportation, medical, agriculture, oil and gas, aeronautical, and space industries. KTH is also one of the primary maintainers of GROMACS, a leading open-source software toolset used by thousands of researchers all over the world to undertake dynamic simulations and analysis of biomolecules.

 

Among the benefits KTH anticipates is AMD Instinct GPU’s support for  ROCm™ - the open, programming language-independent, exascale-class platform for accelerated computing. ROCm offers developers tremendous coding flexibility, making it possible to select and employ the best tools and run-time language for specific applications while making the most of the hardware performance to meet even the most demanding workloads. ROCm is highly portable, meaning future advances such as exascale computing can be placed on one’s roadmap with confidence.

 

The AMD Infinity Architecture, featured in the HPE Cray EX Supercomputer from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that is powering the Dardel system, will help to eliminate traditional platform bottlenecks by providing the high-speed data transfer between GPUs, CPUs, and memory needed to help ensure low latency at the scale of this impressive system.

 

“We are thrilled to be working with HPE and KTH on this advanced supercomputer project," said Roger Benson, Senior Director, Commercial EMEA at AMD. "The combination of cutting-edge AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators will enable scientists and research institutions to meet and exceed the growing computational demands of today's HPC workloads while advancing their research.”

 

The first phase of Dardel is expected to be available to researchers in July 2021, with AMD GPU acceleration targeted to come online in January 2022.

Learn more about AMD HPC Solutions

Guy Ludden is Sr. Product Marketing Manager for AMD Instinct™ Accelerators at AMD.  This posting is his own opinion and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

 

About the Author
Public Relations Manager, Graphics