Supermicro Systems Selected by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for COVID-19 Research
San Jose, Calif., October 7, 2020 -- Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, today announced that LLNL selected Supermicro to provide additional computing capacity and resources for scientists working to find a cure for COVID-19. Supermicro’s 4U 8 GPU servers for this cluster equipped with nearly 1,000 AMD Radeon Instinct™ MI50 graphics accelerators and, combined with AMD’s state-of-the-art EPYC™ 7002 CPUs, expands the cluster to deliver up to 11 Petaflops of computing power for advanced computational workloads.
“Our market-leading 4U 8-GPU servers are optimized for low-latency accelerators performance that leverage our flexible server Building Block Solutions® approach, which enabled LLNL to customize their cluster requirements,” said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. “We are extremely pleased to be working with LLNL to help researchers and scientists find a vaccine for the devastating COVID-19 global pandemic—one of the most critical issues facing society. It’s a great pleasure to work with leading organizations requiring high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and machine learning technology to perform advanced computational workloads and conduct groundbreaking research.”
The US Department of Energy is expanding the Corona supercomputer — named for the total solar eclipse of 2017 — with funding from the Corona Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The additional computing power is allowing researchers to better handle the computationally intensive molecular dynamics simulations, which are critical to finding a cure.
“The Corona system is a major advance in our capability for predictive biomedical modeling for COVID-19,” said LLNL Deputy Associate Director for Programs Jim Brase, who heads the Lab’s COVID-19 research and rapid response effort. “It allows us to develop advanced simulations of the structure and function of the virus and to use largescale machine learning to discover and optimize new therapeutics. This performance boost will help the Corona system lead the way in accelerating pandemic response.”
“We are excited to collaborate with Supermicro to deliver advanced, AMD-based high-performance computing (HPC) systems to LLNL for pandemic research,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group at AMD. “Our AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs will enable scientists to leverage new compute capacity for computational workloads in genomics, vaccine development, and other scientific disciplines.”
