Healthcare increasingly relies on complex, distributed, and secure IT infrastructures spanning functions and geographic locations to deliver cutting-edge patient care and medical research. This ongoing transformation offers many opportunities for IT companies, such as using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for diagnosis and implementing high-performance datacenter systems to boost speed and efficiency. My recent presentation at the Dell Technologies Virtual Summit gave me the opportunity to offer a few thoughts about how AMD EPYC™ processors are contributing to the future of healthcare from research, diagnosis, and patient care to hospital operations and administration.
A report by The Commonwealth Fund reveals that most developed countries invest approximately 10% of their GDP in healthcare. The United States invests almost 18%, and our healthcare sector is by far our largest employer. Today’s healthcare organizations are increasingly relying on very large, highly complex data sets that include patient medical records, claims history, clinical data, pharmaceutical guidelines, research, clinical trial information, and more. Traditional technologies did not anticipate this level of complexity and are not well suited for collecting, storing, and processing massive amounts of data.
Recent innovations are helping healthcare providers realize the potential of—and increasingly, adopt—data analytics and data science. This includes the NoSQL database and “object stores” that handle large amounts of non-linear and non-hierarchical data. Other technologies, such as graph databases, are uniquely positioned to help researchers find new disease patterns and diagnostic relationships.
Here are some examples of how AMD EPYC processors benefit the healthcare sector.
- Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD) performs high-performance simulations of large biomolecular systems, including both preparing the systems and analysis, and analyzing the results. AMD EPYC processors deliver superb performance running NAMD on both bare metal and cloud configurations.
- The Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) is a collection of tools that analyze high-throughput sequencing data than can be used either individually or chained into workflows. Dell Computers published results* that show 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors delivering a performance uplift compared to 2nd Gen AMD EPYC results.
- CP2K is a quantum chemistry and solid-state physics application that simulates solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems at an atomic level. Once again, 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors deliver a solid performance uplift compared to 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors running CP2K on Microsoft Azure™ instances.
- GROMACS is a modular dynamics application that simulates Newtonian motion equations for systems with anywhere from hundreds to millions of particles. Here again, 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors demonstrate industry-leading performance compared to a rival datacenter processor.
- Dell recently showcased a proof-of-concept using nine servers powered by AMD EPYC 7702 processors and a sample TigerGraph data set consisting of 104,000,000 patients. This system retrieved patient records within 10ms, found a provider in under 1.6 seconds, and found two similar patients across 7.4 billion relationships (or edges) in only one minute. These results exceeded customer expectations by a factor of 10. Read all about it in Graph Analytics in Healthcare Operations.
- Healthcare is a regulated market, and the importance of protecting patient, institution, and research data cannot be overstated. Solutions exist to protect data in storage and transit. Confidential Computing seeks to protect data while it is in use without sacrificing performance. AMD EPYC processors support Confidential Computing via Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology. The AMD platform security features built into each EPYC processor helps enable this SEV capability.
- Many industries are reaping the benefits of hyperconverged and virtualized infrastructures with flexible environments that can adapt to ever-changing needs, such as running multiple workloads and scaling resources up or down on demand. Healthcare has been slow to migrate away from legacy siloed technologies because of regulatory and security concerns; however, the security features built into AMD EPYC processors appeal to this sector and encouraging adoption of hyperconvergence and virtualization.
- Some healthcare providers are adopting Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that allows doctors and other employees to access patient records from any device while keeping all compute and storage inside the datacenter. Select AMD EPYC processors have been shown to deliver high performance and support more users per processor than a competing solution.
The collaboration between AMD and Dell continues to drive innovation across the technology spectrum. Healthcare providers and enterprises looking to adopt new technologies can count on us to continue delivering the performance, security innovations, and cost-effectiveness they need.
Please visit AMD EPYC™ Solutions for Industries and Critical Workloads to learn more about how the technology partnership between AMD and Dell is meeting critical workload needs across multiple industries, including healthcare.
Raghu Nambiar is a Corporate Vice President of Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions for AMD. His postings are his own opinions 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.
