Providing HPC Resources to Support COVID-19 Research

Penguin Computing™ has partnered with AMD and our customer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to upgrade the Corona supercomputer with new GPUs to support the ongoing research of the COVID-19 virus.

Before this upgrade, half of the systems nodes were equipped with an older GPU model. Now thanks to AMD’s COVID-19 Fund, which supports coronavirus relief efforts, all nodes in the system have GPU acceleration. By adding these new GPUs, Lawrence Livermore expects to push the Corona system to more than 4.5 petaflops of peak performance.[mk_padding_divider size="15"]
Sid Mair, president of Penguin Computing said, "When we did the original Corona, half the machine was just pure CPU base compute, and half the machine was GPU-accelerated, with the intent of upgrading the rest of the machine for GPU acceleration at a later time when budget was available, so this ended up being a donation rather than having to worry about a budget."

This GPU upgrade is not the only way Penguin Computing is supporting the fight against coronavirus. We are offering cycles POD, our HPC cloud platform, as a free resource for researchers who don’t have the time or budget to deploy new systems for their work.

If you’d like to learn more about how we are using our HPC expertise to support COVID-19 relief efforts, associate editor Dylan Martin at CRN recently published this article, which includes a great interview with our president, Sid Mair.