Penguin Computing Upgrades Corona with Latest AMD Radeon Instinct GPU Technology for Enhanced ML and AI Capabilities

Fre­mont, CA., – Novem­ber 18, 2019 – Pen­gu­in Com­pu­ting, a lea­der in high-per­for­mance com­pu­ting (HPC), arti­fi­ci­al intel­li­gence (AI), and enter­pri­se data cen­ter solu­ti­ons and ser­vices, today announ­ced that Coro­na, an HPC clus­ter first deli­ver­ed to Law­rence Liver­mo­re Natio­nal Lab (LLNL) in late 2018, has been upgraded with the newest AMD Rade­on InstinctTM MI60 acce­le­ra­tors, based on Vega which, per AMD, is the world’s 1st 7nm GPU archi­tec­tu­re that brings PCIe® 4.0 sup­port. This upgrade is the latest exam­p­le of Pen­gu­in Com­pu­ting and LLNL’s ongo­ing col­la­bo­ra­ti­on aimed at pro­vi­ding addi­tio­nal capa­bi­li­ties to the LLNL user community.

As pre­vious­ly released, the clus­ter con­sists of 170 two-socket nodes with 24-core AMD EPYCTM 7401 pro­ces­sors and a PCIe 1.6 Tera­byte (TB) non­vo­la­ti­le (solid-sta­te) memo­ry device. Each Coro­na com­pu­te node is GPU-rea­dy with half of tho­se nodes today uti­li­zing four AMD Rade­on Instinct MI25 acce­le­ra­tors per node, deli­ve­ring 4.2 peta­FLOPS of FP32 peak per­for­mance. With the MI60 upgrade, the clus­ter increa­ses its poten­ti­al PFLOPS peak per­for­mance to 9.45 peta­FLOPS of FP32 peak per­for­mance. This brings signi­fi­cant­ly grea­ter per­for­mance and AI capa­bi­li­ties to the rese­arch communities.

The Pen­gu­in Com­pu­ting DOE team con­ti­nues our col­la­bo­ra­ti­ve ven­ture with our ven­dor part­ners AMD and Mel­lan­ox to ensu­re the Liver­mo­re Coro­na GPU enhance­ments expand the capa­bi­li­ties to con­ti­nue their mis­si­on out­reach within various machi­ne lear­ning com­mu­ni­ties,” said Ken Guden­rath, Direc­tor of Fede­ral Sys­tems at Pen­gu­in Computing.

Coro­na is being made available to indus­try through LLNL’s High Per­for­mance Com­pu­ting Inno­va­ti­on Cen­ter (HPCIC). Fun­ded through the Com­mo­di­ty Tech­no­lo­gy Sys­tems (CTS‑1) con­tract with the Natio­nal Nuclear Secu­ri­ty Admi­nis­tra­ti­on (NNSA), the upgrade will help LLNL rese­ar­chers and their indus­try part­ners impro­ve capa­bi­li­ties in sca­lable deep lear­ning, big data ana­ly­tics and data sci­ence, while enhan­cing NNSA’s abili­ty to assess future archi­tec­tures and meet the needs of the NNSA’s Advan­ced Simu­la­ti­on & Com­pu­ting pro­gram. It will also pro­vi­de a hig­her level of per­for­mance for rese­ar­ching cogni­ti­ve com­pu­ting and deve­lo­ping pre­dic­ti­ve simu­la­ti­ons for appli­ca­ti­ons such as iner­ti­al con­fi­ne­ment fusi­on and mole­cu­lar dyna­mics simu­la­ti­ons for pre­cis­i­on medicine.

This upgrade signi­fi­cant­ly increa­ses the capa­bi­li­ty available on Coro­na,” said Bro­nis R. de Supin­ski, Chief Tech­ni­cal Offi­cer for Liver­mo­re Com­pu­ting. “The new Vega GPUs offer sub­stan­ti­al dou­ble-pre­cis­i­on per­for­mance, in addi­ti­on to much more sin­gle-pre­cis­i­on per­for­mance. LLNL sci­en­tists will use the com­bi­na­ti­on to under­stand the poten­ti­al of mixed-pre­cis­i­on algo­rith­ms for a varie­ty of domains.”

AMD’s Rade­on Instinct MI60 acce­le­ra­tors bring many new fea­tures that impro­ve per­for­mance, inclu­ding the Vega 7nm GPU archi­tec­tu­re and the AMD Infi­ni­ty FabricTM Link tech­no­lo­gy, a peer-to-peer GPU com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons tech­no­lo­gy that deli­vers up to 184 GB/s trans­fer speeds bet­ween GPUs – which is 5.75X fas­ter than PCIe Gen 3, and full-chip Error-cor­rec­ting code (ECC)11 and Relia­bi­li­ty, Acces­si­bi­li­ty and Ser­vicea­bi­li­ty (RAS) 12 tech­no­lo­gies. The new acce­le­ra­tors also uti­li­ze the latest ROCm open source soft­ware stack, which is now inte­gra­ted into lea­ding frame­works like Ten­sor­Flow and PyTorch and maps workloads to the hete­ro­ge­neous com­pu­te resour­ces of the under­ly­ing hardware.

AMD is plea­sed to con­ti­nue col­la­bo­ra­ti­on with LLNL and the NNSA in advan­cing open acce­le­ra­tor solu­ti­ons. Access to sys­tems like Coro­na enable next gene­ra­ti­on sci­en­ti­fic dis­co­very as we move to the exas­ca­le era,” said Ogi Brkic, Cor­po­ra­te Vice Pre­si­dent and Gene­ral Mana­ger of the Data Cen­ter GPU Busi­ness Unit at AMD.

For more infor­ma­ti­on about AMD Rade­on Instinct, plea­se visit www.amd.com/en/graphics/servers-radeon-instinct-mi.

 
 
 

About Penguin Computing

For 20 years, the Pen­gu­in Com­pu­ting team of arti­fi­ci­al intel­li­gence (AI), engi­nee­ring, and com­pu­ter sci­ence experts has reim­agi­ned how start­ups, For­tu­ne 500, govern­ment, and aca­de­mic orga­niza­ti­ons sol­ve com­plex tech­no­lo­gy chal­lenges and achie­ve their orga­niza­tio­nal goals. Pen­gu­in Com­pu­ting is focu­sed on open plat­forms, inclu­ding Open Com­pu­te Pro­ject (OCP) sys­tems. We spe­cia­li­ze in inno­va­ti­ve on-pre­mi­se high-per­for­mance com­pu­ting (HPC), bare metal HPC in the cloud, AI, and sto­rage tech­no­lo­gies cou­pled with lea­ding-edge design, imple­men­ta­ti­on, hos­ting, and mana­ged ser­vices inclu­ding sys-admin and sto­rage-as-a-ser­vice, and high­ly rated cus­to­mer sup­port. More infor­ma­ti­on at www.penguincomputing.com.

 
 
 
 

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