AMD Unleashes GPU For HPC

AMD  announced the AMD FirePro S9150 server card – the most powerful server Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) ever built for High Performance Computing1. Based on the AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, the first AMD architecture designed specifically with compute workloads in mind, the AMD FirePro S9150 server card is the first server card to support enhanced double precision and break the 2.0 TFLOPS double precision barrier. With 16GB of GDDR5 memory  – 33 percent more than the competition –  and maximum power consumption of 235 watts, AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs provide supercomputers with massive compute performance while maximizing available power budgets.

“Today’s supercomputers feature an increasing mix of GPUs, CPUs and co-processors to achieve great performance, and many of them are being implemented in an environmentally responsible manner to help reduce power and water consumption,” said David Cummings, senior director and general manager, professional graphics, AMD. “Designed for large scale multi-GPU support and unmatched compute performance, AMD FirePro S9150 ushers in a new era of supercomputing. Its memory configuration, compute capabilities and performance per watt are unmatched in its class, and can help take supercomputers to the next level of performance and energy efficiency.”

The AMD FirePro S9150 server card is supported by a powerful software ecosystem, enabling developers to better harness its compute performance. In addition to AMD support for OpenCL, including support for OpenCL 2.0 planned later this year, AMD today announced collaboration with Pathscale to support OpenMP 4.0 for AMD FirePro S9150 and selected other AMD FirePro graphics cards.

“Pathscale’s ENZO Compiler with OpenMP 4.0 and support for C, C++, and Fortran is used by customers in the Oil and Gas, Computational Science, Computer Aided Engineering, and other HPC segments,” said Christopher Bergstrom, CTO, Pathscale. “Our support for the AMD FirePro S9150 will enable these customers to benefit from the tremendous compute performance of AMD’s new server GPU while leveraging their existing investment in OpenMP software.”

“Having developed a supercomputer that ranked number two on The Green500 list, it takes exceptional compute performance and efficiency to achieve that status — we couldn’t have done it without AMD FirePro S-Series server GPUs,” said Professor Dr. Volker Lindenstruth, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt. “We’ve been putting the AMD FirePro S9150 through its paces and we’re blown away by the performance-per-watt. Any supercomputer that leverages massive compute power with the AMD FirePro S9150 and makes a run for the top of the Green500 list stands a very good chance of succeeding.”

“We’re currently testing the AMD FirePro S9150 server card and hands down it’s the fastest HPC GPU accelerator we’ve ever tested. We’re even more excited by the prospects of combining its raw compute performance with OpenCL 2.0 later this year,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the Microelectronics Research Group at the University of Bristol. “Our research benefits from an open and royalty-free API, and we’re committed to OpenCL™ to accelerate our computations. We applaud AMD’s planned support for OpenCL 2.0. New features such as Shared Virtual Memory and Nested Parallelism will allow us to make even better use of GPUs to increase performance and efficiency.”

”Supermicro offers the industry’s widest range of GPU server solutions optimized for HPC and supercomputing in 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U SuperServer and 7U SuperBlade platforms,” said Don Clegg, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Supermicro. “Supermicro Green Computing solutions, featuring AMD’s latest AMD FirePro S9150 and AMD FirePro S9050, enable extreme compute density with support for up to 6x GPUs per node in 4U dual node, dual processor configurations, maximizing performance per watt, per dollar, per square foot.”