[Originally posted on 07/30/17 - by Mark Hirsch]

1 PetaFLOPS of Performance for the Ultimate Virtualization and Machine Intelligence Solution

Today at Capsaicin SIGGRAPH, AMD showcased what can be achieved when the world’s greatest server CPU is combined with the world’s greatest GPU, based on AMD’s revolutionary “Vega” architecture. Developed by AMD in collaboration with Inventec, Project 47 is based on Inventec’s P-series massively parallel computing platform, and is a rack designed to excel in a range of tasks, from graphics virtualization to machine intelligence.

Project 47 boasts 1 PetaFLOPS of compute power at full 32-bit precision delivering a stunning 30 GigaFLOPS/W, demonstrating dramatic compute efficiency.1 It boasts more cores, threads, compute units, IO lanes and memory channels in use at one time than in any other similarly configured system ever before. The incredible performance-per-dollar and performance-per-watt of Project 47 makes supercomputing a more affordable reality than ever before, whether for machine learning, virtualization or rendering.

Project 47 is made up of a rack of individual servers, each harnessing one EPYC™ 7601 processor to drive up to four “Vega”-based Radeon Instinct™ MI25 accelerators using 128 PCIe® lanes, in contrast to the costly dual-CPU and PLX switch setups typically needed on competing platforms in order to run four GPUs. With Project 47, AMD showcased the ease with which multiple servers can be daisy-chained, demonstrating a rack of 20 servers running 20 EPYC SoCs and 80 Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerators.

To bring Project 47 to life, AMD worked closely with Samsung Electronics with respect to the HBM2 memory used across the “Vega”-based product lines including the Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerators. Samsung also provided high-performance NVMe SSD storage and high-speed DDR4 memory to enable the 1 PetaFLOPS of performance. AMD also collaborated with Mellanox Technologies, leveraging their InfiniBand solution to deliver 100Gb connectivity through the rack.

Project 47 is expected to be available from Inventec and their principal distributor AMAX in Q4 of this year.

Mark Hirsch, Corporate Vice President, Systems & Solutions for the Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies, or opinions. Links to third party sites and references to third party trademarks are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Project 47 has a total rack power of 34,200 Watts and delivers a performance of 1,027,600 GigaFLOPS for 30.05 GigaFLOPS/W in single precision performance.