CORONAVIRUS

AMD’s tech to power Texas universities’ COVID-19 research

Kara Carlson
AMD president and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Lisa Su delivers a keynote address at CES 2019.

Advanced Micro Devices is donating high-performance computing technology to universities including the University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University to assist in research related to COVID-19.

The move comes as the company looks to build its status as a supplier of vital chips for powerful computer servers. Other universities receiving the donation include Stanford, UCLA, the University of Toronto and other institutions across the U.S., Europe and India.

The announcement follows after an initial donation in June where the company gave the technology to New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Rice University for research.

In total, the company donated high-end computing systems -- or access to Penguin-On-Demand cloud-based clusters powered by AMD’s Epyc and Radeon Instinct processors -- to 21 institutions and research facilities.

The donated AMD technology will be used for a range of pandemic-related research, including genomics, vaccine development, transmission science and modeling.

“The selection process was based on an assessment of the likelihood that access to increased computing resources could accelerate time to findings, the selected universities had ongoing work that would benefit nearly immediately,” Gary Silcott, a spokesman for AMD said, in by email.

The technology will increase capacity for data and speed for the research facilities. Epyc is the company’s main product for data centers, and Radeon is the product name for AMD’s graphics cards.

The donation comes as AMD has been growing its business of supplying high-performance processor chips in the past several years. Patrick Moorhead, a technology industry analyst and founder of Austin-based Moor Insights and Strategy, said the donations showcase AMD’s growing strength in the industry.

“Corporate contributions to causes like AMD’s donations to UT and others is a sign that the company is no longer trying to just survive but it is growing and thriving... high-performance computing capabilities are working on solving some of the world’s biggest challenges like curing diseases, global warming analysis and even improving the global food supply,” Moorhead said.

Silcott said the processors form the foundation for AMD’s data center and server business. He added, the inclusion of a cloud accessible Penguin-On-Demand platform allowed AMD to support the broadest amount of research. Penguin-On-Demand refers to a high-performance computing cloud platform.

Aside from research the AMD processors are traditionally used by a range of companies, including powering large enterprises, small-to-medium businesses and large data centers.

Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, said AMD has long been a relatively minor player in the server world compared to competitors like Intel, which has largely dominated the market. But in recent years under the leadership of CEO Lisa Su, the company has rebounded and grown its market share significantly, Kay said.

AMD topped analyst expectations in its most recent quarterly earnings, in part due to to sales of its Epyc server chips and Ryzen PC processors. At the time, Su said she expected the companies server business to continue to gain momentum as Epyc platforms and cloud deployments ramp up in the second half of the fiscal year.

Kay said the donation helps promote AMD’s rising status and shows it is “in the game” as long-dominant competitor Intel sees its own market slippage.

“Intel is no longer thought of as the one on top of everything. Intel is now among the contenders and has to prove again that it knows how to do this,” Kay said.

UT’s Interim Vice President for Research Alison Preston said the AMD technology will allow UT researchers to extend and expedite their research on the coronavirus.

“AMD CPUs and GPUs will allow our researchers to expand the scope of their COVID-19 work while also helping them accelerate their timeliness significantly. This includes everything from identifying viral spike protein mutations that could help improve vaccines to using machine learning technology to study COVID disease severity in patients of all ages, from newborns to the elderly,” Preston said in a written statement.

Texas State University associate professor Larry Fulton said that the technology will support computationally-intensive work related to mapping, mitigation and detection of diseases including COVID-19. Fulton, who works in the School of Health Administration and said the team is engaged in work related to health disparity identification and resolution for the state of Texas which has been taking up significant computing power.

"AMD is providing one of the solutions to our big data problem—that is, data that taxes our existing capabilities,“ Fulton said in a written statement. ”Some of the methods that AMD is supporting with their gift include machine learning (including deep vision), geographical information systems, complex optimization (e.g., mixed integer nonlinear), and advanced simulation modeling. The computational capability provided by AMD has already helped us with planning our next analysis steps for COVID-19, other infectious diseases and cancer."