Last week I travelled to the Italian capital, Rome, for an event which I believe will prove very significant for the international high performance computing (HPC) industry. After many years away from the HPC arena and the overall server market, AMD is back with a bang and a new range of powerful processors through its AMD EPYC series.
The company started its comeback with the AMD EPYC 7601 range - codenamed “Naples” in 2017 and on Wednesday I witnessed the European launch of their next edition - the AMD EPYC 7002 processors which, as you’ve now probably realised, are codenamed “Rome”.
AMD’s decision to re-enter the HPC market has prompted people to be sceptical of their mission and whether they can pull it off. They knew they had to do something radical on returning to the market, and deliver on any performances promises they made.
And, they’ve done precisely all of that in a fantastic example of industry disruption. Their AMD EPYC series has produced a whole collection of new processing world records and has advanced users expectations on performance and speed. Rome was an exciting place to be last week - it certainly felt like we were witnessing the launch of something revolutionary.
So let’s delve a little deeper and look under the hood. AMD’s EPYC 7002 range of processors are the world's first 7nm CPU featuring up to 64 “Zen 2” cores per SOC and delivering up to 23% more instructions per clock (IPC) per core enabling a typical server with EPYC 7002 Series architecture to deliver up to four times more L3 cache compared to the previous generation. All in all, AMD are re-shaping what we can expect from our processors.
Now, I firmly believe this is a terrific development for not only AMD, but for the entire industry and for the other server and processor vendors who I am pleased to also work closely with. Competition creates energy, forward momentum and technological innovation and I know other processor vendors are rolling-up their sleeves and embracing the ‘EPYC’ challenge (sorry - pun intended...) of meeting AMD head-on. It will be really interesting to see how this increased competition shapes the industry and how processor and server architecture evolves over the next 5 years.
Moving from a warm and sunny Rome to the cooler regimes of Iceland, here at Verne Global we are delighted to now include AMD’s EPYC 7002 processors as part of our HPC Cloud platform - hpcDIRECT. Organisations deploying HPC and AI applications can reserve instances enabling them to enjoy AMD’s super processing performance coupled with Verne Global’s industry-leading infrastructure, TrueHPC methodology and expert HPC support.
As a sample from the hpcDIRECT range, gpc.x01.amd with the 7742 CPU, 225-240 watt TDP, provides 3.48 teraflops of peak double-precision performance running at max boost frequency of 3.4 GHz — almost 7 teraflops in a dual-socket server. At its base frequency of 2.25 GHz, the gpc.x01.amd tops out at a theoretical 2.3 double-precision teraflops.
And, because organisations use clusters in different ways and one-size doesn’t fit all, hpcDIRECT offers both standard and optimised server configurations to help organisations decide the exact type of compute they need. Standard compute nodes are designed for more general-purpose computing whereas some servers have been carefully optimised and lean more towards a specialised market or field, for example, more memory, higher networking capabilities, etc.
If you’re interested in sampling hpcDIRECT with AMD EPYC 7002 Series processors please do not hesitate to get in touch via our website and we’ll be pleased to run you through your options. As they say, when in Rome...
