Tech News

AMD Announces Initiative for Energy Efficiency

Chip maker AMD has announced a bold initiative to deliver a 30x increase in energy efficiency for the AMD EPYC CPUs and Instinct accelerators for AI and HPC applications by 2025. According to the press release, the ambitious effort will require the company to "…increase the energy efficiency of a compute node at a rate that is more than 2.5x faster than the aggregate industry-wide improvement made during the last five years."

The announcement is part of the new goals embodied in AMD's Environmental Social Governance (ESG) initiative. The company describes the goals in terms of social responsibility, but the initiative wouldn't happen if it didn't also make business sense. Power usage has long been a limitation for HPC systems, and AMD is always looking for an edge – something to specialize in to distinguish them from Intel. Meanwhile, energy-efficient ARM processors continue to challenge the HPC space.

See the full announcement at the AMD website (https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2021-09-29-amd-announces-ambitious-goal-to-increase-energy-efficiency-processors).

NOAA Announces $171 Million for Climate Research

Projects will focus on resilience, improvements in climate models, and a deeper understanding of the impact of air quality on climate.

The Climate Program office of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) has announced awards totaling $171 million for 72 projects to improve resilience to climate change. The allotment is the largest five-year investment in the program's history. Universities and research institutions within the US will work with NOAA laboratories and research centers.

Projects will cover "…a broad spectrum of climate research areas that include advancing environmental justice; improvements in climate models; advances in the use and understanding of ocean observations to enhance NOAA's climate modeling; understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic affected local and regional air quality; advances in resilience planning for future flooding impacts and other coastal stressors; and studying how emissions and chemical reactions impact air quality and climate in the urban atmosphere."

See the NOAA website for more information (https://cpo.noaa.gov/Funding-Opportunities/FY2021-Recipients).