Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are accelerating their research into Covid-19, extreme weather and drug discovery thanks to HPC hadrware donated by AMD through its Covid-19 fund.
Brock Taylor, global HPC solutions director at AMD commented on the announcement in a recent blog post: ‘As the world came together last year in an effort to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, UT Austin was one recipients of the AMD Covid-19 HPC Fund, allowing their researchers access to petaflop-scale compute power via systems with AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators.’
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) launched Lonestar6, a Dell Technologies supercomputer powered by AMD EPYC processors that will be capable of up to three petaflops of computation – roughly 3 quadrillion operations per second.
Using the latest AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors, Lonestar 6 will be the seventh fastest supercomputer at a US university and three times more powerful than the Lonestar 5 system that it replaces.
‘Supercomputing drives answers to some of life’s biggest questions, spanning medical, bioinformatics and social sciences,’ added Taylor. ‘With infinite topics to explore, institutions across the world have worked to provide scientists and scholars with access to some of the fastest high-performance systems available. Here at AMD, we are inspired by these researchers’ dedication to discovery and are excited to help provide the institutions, like UT Austin, with the advanced computing capabilities needed to solve the challenges of today and tomorrow.’
‘Texas is a national leader in computational science and engineering with the TACC ecosystem including Lonestar6, the possibilities are vast. As UT Austin and other institutions across the state and world continue to expand computational efforts with supercomputing systems, we strive to continuously deliver innovative and high-performing products that can tackle the most demanding HPC workloads.
'Everything is bigger in Texas' is a well-worn and fitting adage. For AMD, that means bigger and better computing performance that will help researchers and partners make bigger and better discoveries,’ comments Taylor.
