PowerEdge R7615

AMD Instinct MI210 Accelerator

Today, Innovation is GPU constrained, and we are seeing explosive growth in AI workloads, namely transformer based models for Generative AI. This blog explores AMD ROCm™ software and AMD GPUs, and AMD readiness for primetime. 

AMD ROCm™ or Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) was launched in 2016 as an open-source software foundation for GPU computing in Linux, providing developers with tools to leverage GPUs compute capacity to advance their workloads across applications including high performance computing and advanced rendering. It provides a comprehensive set of tools and libraries for programming GPUs in a variety of languages, including C++, Python, and R. 

| AMD ROCm™ can be used to accelerate a variety of workloads, such as:

• Scientific computing and computer-aided design (CAD): AMD ROCm™ can accelerate scientific simulations, such as molecular dynamics and computational fluid dynamics.
• Artificial Intelligence: AMD ROCm™ can be used to train and deploy AI models faster and more efficiently.
• Data science: AMD ROCm™ can accelerate data processing and analytics tasks.
• Graphics and visualization: AMD ROCm™ can create and render high-performance graphics and visualizations.

With the broad and rising adoption of Generative AI driving the need for parallel computational power of GPUs to train, fine-tune, and deploy deep learning models, AMD ROCm™ has expanded support for the leading AI frameworks in TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX runtime, and more recently Hugging Face.  

Hugging Face and AMD announced a collaboration to support AMD ROCm™ and hardware platforms to deliver leadership transformer performance on AMD CPUs and GPUs for training and inference. The initial focus will be on AMD Instinct™ MI2xx and MI3xx series GPUs¹.

AMD and Hugging Face plan to support transformer architectures for natural language processing, computer vision, and speech. Plans also include traditional computer vision models and recommendation models.

| “We will integrate AMD ROCm™ SDK seamlessly in our open-source libraries, starting with the transformers library.” 

Further, Hugging Face highlighted plans for a new Optimum library dedicated to AMD¹. In addition to the growing ecosystem for AI software support for AMD ROCm™, Dell™ offers a portfolio of leading edge PowerEdge™ hardware supporting AMD ROCm™ and the AMD MI210 across Dell™ PowerEdge™ R760xa and R7615 servers.

The breadth of hardware offerings gives enterprise users of AMD ROCm™ robust hardware choices to pair with fast-advancing software support.

The architecture above showcases the robust availability of AMD ROCm™ software and Hugging Face integration, allowing developers to run leading transformer models optimized on AMD Instinct™ GPUs today. Dell™ offers a robust portfolio of PowerEdge™ servers that support GPUs supported by AMD ROCm™.

This enables customers to easily get the hardware needed to test, develop, and deploy AI solutions with AMD ROCm™.

| So is AMD ROCm™ Ready for AI Workloads?

Though the AMD ROCm™ adoption and ecosystem maturity are nascent, the support of leading AI frameworks and collaboration with key ecosystem partners such as Hugging Face, paired with AMD advancements in GPU Hardware, make it ready to take on the leading AI workloads today. 

In part II of this blog series, we will put the architecture to the test and develop a LLM-based chatbot on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers with AMD ROCm™ and AMD GPUs. 

Blog II

| References 

https://huggingface.co/blog/huggingface-and-amd

| Authors

Steen Graham, CEO of Scalers AI

Delmar Hernandez, Dell PowerEdge Technical Marketing

Mohan Rokkam, Dell PowerEdge Technical Marketing