The Project 47 is a 1 petaFLOPS parallel computing platform with 20 AMD EPYC 7601 CPUs

AMD’s Capsaicin event at Siggraph 2017 turned out to have quite a heavy focus on the commercial space.

AMD introduced its Radeon RX Vega cards and Threadripper CPUs, but it also spent a lot of time on its new Radeon Pro cards and AMD Studios initiative, the latter a push to support leading entertainment companies and content creators in advancing techniques in AI, high-fidelity rendering, and various virtual and post-production technologies.

And just before the event wound down, AMD CEO Lisa Su trotted out the Project 47, a parallel computing platform that is the result of a partnership between AMD and Inventec.

The platform’s key draw is its 1 petaFLOPS of single-precision computing power, which actually translates to a whopping one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

The 2U form factor machine packs a total of 20 32-core AMD EPYC 7601 CPUs and 80 Radeon Instinct GPUs, in addition to 20 Mellanox 100G InfiniBand cards.

The IBM Roadrunner, which features 6,480 AMD Opteron CPUs, first achieved 1 petaFLOPS of performance in 2008, five years after AMD first debuted its dual-core Opteron processors.

However, AMD’s new EPYC processors are now responsible for the latest 1 petaFLOPS machine, despite having only been announced this year.

According to the company, the P47 boasts more cores, threads, compute units, I/O lanes and memory channels in use at one time than any other similarly configured system.

Having said that, it’s designed to do well in a range of tasks, including things like cloud computing, machine intelligence and deep learning, and graphics virtualizations.

The P47 is expected to be available from Inventec and its principal distributor AMAX in the fourth quarter of 2017.