Dept. of Energy Gives AMD $32M Grant to Push Exascale Computing Forward

AMD announced that it was awarded more than $32 million in research grants for exascale computing reseearch projects associated with the U.S. Department of Energy's FastForward 2 program. Jointly funded by the DOE and National Nuclear Security Administration the FastForward 2 grants will fund research that targets exascale applications for AMD Accelerated Processing Units based on the open standard Heterogeneous System Architecture.

FastForward 2 funds were announced as part of a larger $425 million allotment U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz announced to help bolster U.S. efforts in exascale computing.

This is the third time the DOE has awarded AMD an exascale computing research grant. Another recipient is NVIDIA. Intel has received such funding in the past as well.

IBM recently secured a $300 million DOE contract for two new supercomputers using its OpenPOWER processor architecture. The department has 14 supercomputers on the latest release of the Top500 list of fastest computing systems in the world, including one in the second spot: Titan -- a Cray XK7 with AMD Opteron 6274 processors.

AMD says it will conduct research for an integrated exascale node architecture based on its HSA-enabled APUs. Through collaborative efforts it will also help define a new standard for memory interfaces that meets the needs of future-generation memory devices, including non-volatile memory and processing-in-memory (PIM) architectures.