“Customers each have unique needs but a common goal – securing and gaining insight from their data. They trust Cohesity, in part, because we strive to offer the largest ecosystem with the most choices to suit their preferences,” said John Davidson, group vice president, Americas Sales, Cohesity. “By supporting AMD EPYC CPU-powered servers, we’re opening up new options for our customers to customize and modernize their data center, increasing performance and delivering energy, space, and cost savings so they can execute their data security and management strategy on their preferred hardware configurations.”

All-flash servers have become an increasingly popular choice for organizations with high-demand applications and workloads, stringent power budgets for their data centers, or increasing storage capacity requirements and little physical space within their data center. Leveraging the performance, cost efficiency, and energy efficiency of AMD EPYC CPUs, Cohesity now delivers compelling AMD-powered all-flash servers from HPE to modernize customer data centers and meet the requirements of green initiatives through the greater density, performance, and cost savings all-flash servers provide over traditional servers. Single-socket 1U HPE servers based on AMD EPYC can reduce the number of required nodes and power costs by up to 33% when compared with dual-socket 2U servers based on other CPUs. Additionally, through the HPE Secure Supply Chain, Cohesity’s software is preloaded at the factory, reducing deployment and increasing the security of the overall solution.

“Businesses increasingly demand more from their data centers to meet their business needs —more performance, more energy efficiency, more cost savings,” said Kumaran Siva, corporate vice president, Strategic Market Development, AMD. “AMD is uniquely positioned to help meet the demands of the modern data center while enabling technology partners, like Cohesity, to deliver business critical applications like their AI-powered data security and management capabilities.”

Cohesity’s AI-powered data security and management capabilities are now generally available on AMD-powered all-flash servers from HPE and hybrid servers from Dell and Lenovo.

Learn more about Cohesity Data Cloud supporting AMD EPYC CPU-powered servers by reading the blog: “Revamping Your Data Centers with Cohesity on HPE Next-Gen Compute, Powered by AMD” here.

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Ecosystem Support Builds for Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing

To help democratize confidential computing, VMware researched, developed and open sourced the developer-focused Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project. By standardizing on an easy-to-use, platform-independent API for creating and operating confidential computing applications, AMD, Samsung and VMware aim to address a significant barrier to its adoption.

Confidential computing is based on an emerging processor concept called a “trusted execution environment” that maintains the confidentiality and integrity of programs and data even when workloads are deployed in the cloud or infrastructure (such as the edge) that may be operated by others. Uniform security protections based on confidential computing are expected to be increasingly important in the context of multi-cloud deployments. Also, in the context of emerging workloads like machine learning, confidential computing can play a special role in protecting the intellectual property and proprietary data related to the foundation models and code, proprietary model derivatives, and private training data. Although this concept is an enormous advancement for security and privacy, like many hardware features, it will not be widely adopted until it becomes easier to develop applications in the new paradigm.

The Certifier Framework vastly simplifies the development of more secure cloud workloads, secret-keeping services, and privacy-preserving applications including an emerging class of machine learning and “data economy” workloads that are based on sensitive data and models aggregated from multiple sources. The framework provides platform-independent support for specifying and enforcing trust policies that can better secure workloads across on-prem and third-party infrastructure, including the telco edge, multi-cloud environments, and sovereign clouds. By collectively advancing and contributing to the open source Certifier Framework, the companies and community members aim to effectively standardize on a set of developer APIs that will benefit the entire industry by accelerating the adoption of confidential computing as it becomes available in the x86, Arm, and RISC-V ecosystems.

“Confidential Computing has the potential to secure workloads no matter where they run including in multi-cloud and edge settings,” said Kit Colbert, CTO, VMware. “The challenge has been to help customers adopt and implement the standard with ease. The collective efforts of the growing ecosystem of contributors to Certifier Framework will help bring those benefits to bear to ISVs, enterprise customers, and Sovereign Cloud providers—enabling them to use this emerging technology more easily and effectively.”

VMware at the Confidential Computing Summit 2023

The certifier’s capabilities, representative of VMware’s commitment to the future of multi-cloud security, are being highlighted at today’s Confidential Computing Summit. VMware along with other contributors to the Certifier Framework project will show demos of client/cloud confidential computing in compelling machine learning use cases. In particular, the demos will showcase “universal” client-cloud trust management across heterogeneous TEEs including AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), SGX, CCA, and RISC-V.

Supporting Quotes

“AMD is a pioneer of advanced hardware-based security features such as AMD Infinity Guard, with built-in capabilities like Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), in our EPYC data center processors,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystems and Solutions, AMD. “Collaborating with industry partners, like VMware, is critical for accelerating adoption of confidential computing and securing workloads in the cloud. No matter the size or technical sophistication of an organization, or where a workload is deployed, the Certifier Framework will help more customers realize the benefits of confidential computing.”

“Samsung is committed to extending confidential computing to endpoints through their Islet interface to the Arm CCA architecture,” said Yong Ho Hwang, VP and Head of Security & Privacy Team at Samsung Electronics. “We are pleased to be a supporter of the Certifier Framework and share the common goal of accelerating the adoption of confidential computing through a developer-friendly API for confidential computing trust management.”

“Keystone brings the benefits of open source to the confidential computing hardware community,” said Krste Asanovic, Professor, Computer Science Division, EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley. “We are pleased to leverage the Certifier Framework to help confidential computing developers maintain choice over platform selection as our capabilities evolve.”

For more information about VMware, please visit the website HERE and AMD HERE and Samsung HERE.

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OEMs, enterprises and data center operators across a wide range of industries are adopting SmartNIC solutions to achieve levels of performance, security, latency and energy efficiency that are unachievable with servers or appliances equipped with traditional “foundational” NICs. As the leading provider of field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based SmartNICs, Napatech leverages the extensive portfolio of AMD Xilinx FPGAs, in combination with its own commercial-grade software suites, to accelerate and offload a variety of workloads in cybersecurity, financial systems, mobile infrastructure, data centers, network appliances and monitoring solutions.

Many companies that can benefit from Napatech’s SmartNIC solutions are already customers of the extensive AMD processor portfolio, leveraging EPYC processors in servers or Ryzen processors in workstations. The expanded collaboration between AMD and Napatech is designed to enable AMD experts and channel partners to propose and architect end-to-end solutions for these companies, spanning their network infrastructure as well as their processor subsystem. Fine-tuning the balance of workloads between the processor and the SmartNIC through true system-level design results in optimized performance, system cost and energy efficiency for the target applications.

End-users who adopt Napatech’s SmartNIC solutions benefit from a true “IT” experience, whereby they simply install a card, load a driver, and achieve seamless acceleration of common applications, both commercial and open source, with no need for custom programming at either the application or FPGA level.

As one example of the benefits of Napatech SmartNIC solutions based on AMD FPGAs, a tier-one global cybersecurity OEM that needed to scale the performance of their security appliance leveraged Napatech’s Link-Capture software running on the NT200 SmartNIC with AMD Virtex® UltraScale+ VU9P FPGA. This company achieved industry-leading performance measured in terms of packet rate, lossless throughput, low latency and millions of simultaneous flows. Similarly, an edge data center operator increased the performance of virtual switching for traffic between Virtual Machines (VMs) via the Link-Virtualization software running on the NT100 (Virtex UltraScale+ VU5P). This resulted in a doubling of VM density and a 49% reduction in data center OPEX calculated over a five-year period.

“Programmable SmartNICs, including IPUs and DPUs, are a critical part of modern network infrastructure and data center designs. The demand for these innovative technologies is rapidly increasing as services must be distributed as close as possible to the applications they support, without impacting CPU performance,” said Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst and Practice Director at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “We expect that this expanded collaboration between AMD and Napatech will accelerate SmartNIC adoption across a wide range of use cases, given the global reach of the AMD sales team and their channel partners.”

“GL Communications Inc, a leading telecom test equipment provider, is a proud user of Napatech SmartNICs based on AMD FPGAs to drive feature rich Protocol Emulators and Analyzers at up to 100 Gbps, permitting wire speed capture and analysis for 100,000+ simultaneous sessions,” said Vijay Kulkarni, CEO at GL Communications. “As an established Napatech customer, we have found that their solutions provide the performance and feature velocity required for our markets, so we are delighted to see the announcement of their new partnership with AMD.”

“FPGA-based SmartNICs comprise the majority of SmartNIC ports currently deployed in network infrastructure and data centers,” said Napatech CEO Ray Smets. “We are excited to be working closely with AMD as a long-term supplier of the FPGAs used in our SmartNICs, and we look forward to working with them to increase the adoption of these solutions worldwide.”

For more information on Napatech’s SmartNIC solutions based on AMD FPGAs, visit the website here.

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The new AMD Radeon PRO W6400 graphics card is built on the high-performance, energy efficient AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture and advanced 6nm manufacturing process technology, with 16MB of high-bandwidth, low-latency AMD Infinity Cache memory technology acting as a bandwidth amplifier. Offering an ideal blend of performance and efficiency at an affordable price, the new graphics card is optimized for the requirements of  today’s popular CAD and office productivity applications in a compact design that can be easily added to modern small-form-factor desktops.

Compared to the previous generation, the AMD Radeon PRO W6400 graphics card delivers up to three times higher performance in Autodesk AutoCAD^© 2022 during 3D orbit rotational tests in shaded modes. It also offers up to 87 percent higher performance in McNeel Rhino using the Holomark 2 benchmark with mesh, object and model data stress tests. The new graphics card also offers performance gains in typical office applications and workloads, such as videoconferencing, email and web browsing, where reliability and stability are key.

Additions to the AMD Radeon PRO product family also include the AMD Radeon PRO W6500M and AMD Radeon PRO W6300M GPUs for next-gen professional mobile workstations. The new GPUs are also built on AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture with 6nm process technology and harness up to 8MB of AMD Infinity Cache memory technology to deliver ultra-high viewport frame rates, dependability and exceptional performance for professional applications.

“Work patterns have changed dramatically over the last year, requiring professional users to work more efficiently and complete projects faster than ever,” said Scott Herkelman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit at AMD. “The Radeon PRO W6400 is a powerful graphics card that harnesses the award-winning AMD RDNA 2 architecture feature set, enabling not only mainstream CAD professionals to produce incredible and complex designs, but also meeting the demands of today’s office workers who need to edit images, create presentations, collaborate and multitask more than ever. In addition, the new AMD Radeon PRO W6000 Series mobile graphics provide the ideal combination of performance and mobility to drive a range of workloads for professionals on the go.”

High-Performance and Advanced Features

The new additions to the AMD Radeon PRO product family deliver an ideal combination of performance, efficiency, and affordability for mainstream professional users. Key features include:

• AMD RDNA 2 Architecture: The award-winning AMD RDNA 2 graphics architecture delivers up to 94 percent faster performance over previous generation GCN architecture.
• AMD Infinity Cache Memory Technology: Up to 16MB of last-level data cache (L3) integrated on the GPU die is designed to reduce latency and power consumption, enabling higher performance compared to previous architectural designs.
• Advanced Features: AMD Radeon PRO W6000 Series graphics offer hardware-accelerated raytracing, remote working capabilities, 8K display support, the latest PCIe® 3.0 and 4.0 high-speed data transfer, VR creator support, HDR Ready support and Quad-buffer stereo – all supported as standard features.
• Viewport Boost: The dynamic resolution technology is designed to improve frame rates in GPU-limited scenarios. By intelligently lowering resolution only in scenarios where fast in-viewport movement is detected, it can deliver a significant improvement in interactivity without impacting user-perceived image quality.
• Application Certifications: AMD continues to work with leading professional software application vendors such as Autodesk, Robert McNeel & Associates, and others to help ensure AMD Radeon PRO graphics cards are built and tested to meet exceptional standards, delivering the stability and reliability required by workstation professionals. The list of certified applications can be found here.

For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD website.

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Built on AMD CDNA 2 architecture, AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators deliver leading application performance for a broad set of HPC workloads.² The AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator provides up to 4.9X better performance than competitive accelerators for double precision (FP64) HPC applications and surpasses 380 teraflops of peak theoretical half-precision (FP16) for AI workloads to enable disruptive approaches in further accelerating data-driven research.

“AMD Instinct MI200 accelerators deliver leadership HPC and AI performance, helping scientists make generational leaps in research that can dramatically shorten the time between initial hypothesis and discovery,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group, AMD. “With key innovations in architecture, packaging and system design, the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators are the most advanced data center GPUs ever, providing exceptional performance for supercomputers and data centers to solve the world’s most complex problems.”

Exascale With AMD

AMD, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and HPE, designed the Frontier supercomputer expected to deliver more than 1.5 exaflops of peak computing power. Powered by optimized 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, Frontier will push the boundaries of scientific discovery by dramatically enhancing performance of AI, analytics, and simulation at scale, helping scientists to pack in more calculations, identify new patterns in data, and develop innovative data analysis methods to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.

“The Frontier supercomputer is the culmination of a strong collaboration between AMD, HPE and the U.S. Department of Energy, to provide an exascale-capable system that pushes the boundaries of scientific discovery by dramatically enhancing performance of artificial intelligence, analytics, and simulation at scale,” said Thomas Zacharia, director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Powering The Future of HPC

The AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators, combined with 3^rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs and the ROCm 5.0 open software platform, are designed to propel new discoveries for the exascale era and tackle our most pressing challenges from climate change to vaccine research.

Key capabilities and features of the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators include:

• AMD CDNA 2 architecture – 2^nd Gen Matrix Cores accelerating FP64 and FP32 matrix operations, delivering up to 4X the peak theoretical FP64 performance vs. AMD previous gen GPUs.^1,3,4
• Leadership Packaging Technology – Industry-first multi-die GPU design with 2.5D Elevated Fanout Bridge (EFB) technology delivers 1.8X more cores and 2.7X higher memory bandwidth vs. AMD previous gen GPUs, offering the industry’s best aggregate peak theoretical memory bandwidth at 3.2 terabytes per second.^4,5,6
• 3rd Gen AMD Infinity Fabric technology – Up to 8 Infinity Fabric links connect the AMD Instinct MI200 with 3^rd Gen EPYC CPUs and other GPUs in the node to enable unified CPU/GPU memory coherency and maximize system throughput, allowing for an easier on-ramp for CPU codes to tap the power of accelerators.

Software for Enabling Exascale Science

AMD ROCm is an open software platform allowing researchers to tap the power of AMD Instinct accelerators to drive scientific discoveries. The ROCm platform is built on the foundation of open portability, supporting environments across multiple accelerator vendors and architectures. With ROCm 5.0, AMD extends its open platform powering top HPC and AI applications with AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators, increasing accessibility of ROCm for developers and delivering leadership performance across key workloads.

Through the AMD Infinity Hub, researchers, data scientists and end-users can easily find, download and install containerized HPC apps and ML frameworks that are optimized and supported on AMD Instinct accelerators and ROCm. The hub currently offers a range of containers supporting either Radeon Instinct MI50, AMD Instinct MI100 or AMD Instinct MI200 accelerators including several applications like Chroma, CP2k, LAMMPS, NAMD, OpenMM and more, along with popular ML frameworks TensorFlow and PyTorch. New containers are continually being added to the hub.

Available Server Solutions

The AMD Instinct MI250X and AMD Instinct MI250 are available in the open-hardware compute accelerator module or OCP Accelerator Module (OAM) form factor. The AMD Instinct MI210 will be available in a PCIe® card form factor in OEM servers.

The AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator is currently available from HPE in the HPE Cray EX Supercomputer, and additional AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators are expected in systems from major OEM and ODM partners in enterprise markets in Q1 2022, including ASUS, ATOS, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Penguin Computing, and Supermicro.

MI200 Series Specifications

Models	Compute Units	Stream Processors	FP64 | FP32 Vector (Peak)	FP64 | FP32 Matrix (Peak)	FP16 | bf16 (Peak)	INT4 | INT8 (Peak)	HBM2e ECC Memory	Memory Bandwidth	Form Factor
AMD Instinct MI250x	220	14,080	Up to 47.9 TF	Up to 95.7 TF	Up to 383.0 TF	Up to 383.0 TOPS	128GB	3.2 TB/sec	OCP Accelerator Module
AMD Instinct MI250	208	13,312	Up to 45.3 TF	Up to 90.5 TF	Up to 362.1 TF	Up to 362.1 TOPS	128GB	3.2 TB/sec	OCP Accelerator Module

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“The commitment of AMD to technological innovation aligns with our mission to develop and accelerate the adoption of the hybrid cloud to help connect, secure and power our digital world,” said Dario Gil, Director of IBM Research. “IBM is focused on giving our clients choice, agility and security in our hybrid cloud offerings through advanced research, development and scaling of new technologies.”

“This agreement between AMD and IBM aligns well with our long-standing commitment to collaborating with leaders in the industry,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and CTO, AMD. “AMD is excited to extend our work with IBM on AI, accelerating data center workloads, and improving security across the cloud.”

For many companies, securing highly sensitive data still remains a challenge: cybersecurity is currently the top barrier for adoption as well as the top criteria for selection of cloud providers, according to data from IBM’s Institute for Business value.

According to Gartner, Confidential Computing potentially removes the remaining barrier to hybrid cloud adoption for highly regulated businesses or any organization concerned about unauthorized third-party access to data in use in the public cloud.

Confidential Computing is a technology, enabled by hardware, that allows the data associated with a running virtual machine (VM) to be encrypted, including while workloads are running. This capability helps prevent would-be attackers and bad actors from accessing confidential information, even in the event of a break-in. Confidential Computing for hybrid cloud unlocks new potential for enterprise adoption of hybrid cloud computing, especially in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and insurance.

Engagement between AMD and IBM researchers on joint development activities under the agreement is now underway.

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