News GIGABYTE Technology, Northern Data AG and AMD Join Forces to Drive HPC Mega-Project

[DisEnchantment]

GIGABYTE Technology, Northern Data AG and AMD Join Forces to Drive HPC Mega-Project | News - GIGABYTE Global

__Taipei, Taiwan, September 9th 2020 – GIGABYTE Technology, (TWSE: 2376), an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today is an...

www.gigabyte.com

Taipei, Taiwan, September 9th 2020 – GIGABYTE Technology, (TWSE: 2376), an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today is announcing a partnership with Northern Data AG (XETRA: NB2, ISIN: DE000A0SMU87) to create a HPC mega-project with computing power of around 3.1 exaflops.

GIGABYTE will supply GPU-based server systems equipped with proven AMD EPYC™ processors and AMD Radeon Instinct™ accelerators from technology partner AMD, a leading provider of high performance computing and graphics technologies, to Northern Data.

Another HPC win for AMD A+A. Not mention about the delivery window though.
Apparently uses EPYC Rome + unknown Radeon Instinct accelerator, probably CDNA based.

Sukh Dhillon, EMEA Commercial Channel Sales Director at AMD, comments: “We are delighted to be in collaboration with GIGABYTE and Northern Data, one of the global leaders in HPC computing. We look forward to working on this unique flagship project utilizing second generation AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct accelerators helping set superior standards for performance, security and scalability for the most demanding workloads.”

 

[moinmoin]

Hm, Northern Data was reporting on their partnership on July 21st already, but back then they didn't mention that they'll use AMD hardware:

Northern Data – the revolution of HPC infrastructure.

With its new class of green and highly efficient data centers, Northern Data offers Bitcoin Hosting & Services and cloud based HPC on a global scale.

northerndata.de

 

[DrMrLordX]

Rome + CDNA? That's eccentric. Milan should be out before any CDNA-based products hit the market.

 

[Vattila]

Rome + CDNA?

It is probably based on current available hardware, based on the deployment schedule:

"The hardware will be delivered in the coming weeks and months."

Should be easily upgraded or extended by AMD's upcoming products, though.

 

[Vattila]

This is another good "A+A" win for AMD.

It seems the HPC space, in the high end at least, is not captive to CUDA (contrary to the thinking of many industry analysts and investors, mesmerized by Nvidia's growth and lead in AI), and that ROCm is taken seriously as an open alternative. It remains to be seen what becomes of Raja's competing effort with OneAPI at Intel. Unless their hardware overtakes AMD and Nvidia, then a third software effort, even if by Intel, will probably not amount to much — unless it has some cleverness with sufficiently substantial advantages (of which I am not aware).

 

[DrMrLordX]

It is probably based on current available hardware, based on the deployment schedule:

What hardware AMD makes available to bigwigs is different from the mass market, but from what I've seen, Milan should already be available to the big cloud boys in early silicon (or will be soon) while CDNA won't show its face until later this year. It may be that they're going with Rome just for validation purposes (I have no idea how long it takes to validate compute accelerator cards like CDNA).