Emerging technologies: an AMD MI250X GPU-based platform for HPC applications

The last few years has seen an increased prevalence of GPU-based systems in national high-performance computing (HPC) services in many countries. A striking example is the United States Exascale programme, where almost all present and foreseeable top-tier supercomputing services have a GPU component. While the current UK ARCHER2 national service has no GPU component, a number of second tier research council services do. These services typically use NVIDIA technology. It is therefore of particular interest that in 2022, the ARCHER2 support team was given access by HPE to an AMD-based technology to allow the investigation described in this short report.