Sun is teaching COVID-19 researchers how to use high-performance AMD computers
Large segments of the world’s research community refocused in early 2020 in response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic.
Biochemists, epidemiologists, molecular biologists, geneticists and other specialists began working on various ways to model, track and attack the novel coronavirus using the most sophisticated scientific techniques and methods. Those techniques have become increasingly computationally intensive in nature, requiring high-performance computing not always available to the COVID research community.
The multinational semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices — AMD — stepped into the fight against COVID-19 by supporting 23 organizations in addressing issues such as vaccine development, genetic sequencing and modeling of the outbreak. AMD provides researchers with high-performance computing devices, especially graphics processing units, supported by the AMD Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) platform.
AMD brought in a set of instructors, including William & Mary’s Yifan Sun, to make sure the researchers get the maximum benefit of the combined 12 petaflops of computing capacity. Sun and his fellow instructors are holding a series of online lectures and office hours to get the COVID researchers up to speed on graphics processing unit (GPU) computing and, in particular, the computing language needed.
