AMD donates EPYC CPUs, GPUs, and more to fight against COVID-19

AMD has announced it's donating $15 million worth of EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs towards researching COVID-19 and other diseases. 

As part of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, the firm hopes to help accelerate medical research into how the virus has come about, as well as how best to vaccinate against it and so forth. In the statement, AMD explained that it's working with its HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes so that the equipment is good to go immediately. CEO of AMD, Lisa Su, explained, 'this is a unique private-public effort spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Energy and IBM to bring together government, industry, and university leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources on world-class supercomputers to help fight the global pandemic.'

The efforts involve offering resources for the Corona system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with those resources nearly doubling peak system performance when it comes to molecular modelling. 

As well as that, AMD is contributing more than $1 million to relevant charities including Chinese Red Cross Foundation, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Europe, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Austin Community Foundation in the United States. It's also assisting local organisations within Canada, India, Malaysia, and Singapore. 

There are also donations of hundreds of thousands of masks for medical professionals, an extra $1 million through a 2:1 employee gift matching scheme, and a prioritisation of shipments of AMD embedded processors used in ventilators and respirators. 

AMD is just one of the companies that's been quick to assist. Intel offered one million protective items to healthcare workers, along with $6 million for Coronavirus relief, $40 million in learning initiatives, $10 million to support partner and employee-led initiatives, and has also granted free access to intellectual property to COVID-19 researchers and scientists. Qualcomm has also donated an undisclosed amount to several funds as well as supplied laptops and devices to schools and non-profits, with the likes of Nvidia, Amazon's AWS and VMWare all chipping in unused GPU compute time to help Folding@Home. 

Combined, the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium provides 418 petaflops of processing power right now in a bid to get to the bottom of the virus.