AMD technology powers computers and servers that enable a better world – from helping scientists advance healthcare and climate-change research to optimizing clean energy and “greening” cloud computing data centers.
Advancing Healthcare in Nigeria
eHealth Nigeria is an NGO dedicated to improving its country’s healthcare. Due to a lack of consistent reliable energy to enable network and server access, the Nigerian healthcare system was critically limited. eHealth addressed the problem by designing a small, yet fully functional data center with a dedicated power source. They determined that servers with multi-core AMD Opteron™ processors would deliver the optimum combination of energy efficiency and processing power for this rugged environment.
Read more about e’Health’s work in Nigeria on AMD’s customer reference website here.
Making Personalized Medicine Affordable
Personalized medicine has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by tailoring treatment and prevention based on the patient’s genes – a process requiring complex DNA sequencing. Using the “Ranger” supercomputer driven by AMD Opteron™ processors, Dr. Aleksei Aksimentiev at the University of Illinois is developing a process that increases the speed and efficiency of DNA sequencing, which could reduce costs from $50,000 to less than $1,000 per individual.
Listen to Dr. Aksimentiev discuss his work on NPR’s Earthsky podcast, available on AMD’s customer reference website.
Increasing Wind Energy Efficiency
In a 100-megawatt wind farm, a small drop in output can result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. A supercomputer built by Nor-Tech featuring AMD Opteron™ processors is helping engineers optimize turbine efficiency and output. The system computes highly complex fluid dynamics to fine tune turbine placement and positioning, which reduces wake turbulence and allows maximum power output.
Read more about Nor-Tech on AMD’s customer reference website.
Understanding and Preparing for Climate Change
The Kraken computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was the first academic “petascale” supercomputer (a system that can perform more than one thousand- trillion operations per second). Using AMD Opteron™ processors, Kraken allows scientists to develop complex weather simulation models to predict and understand the effects of climate change. Using these models, researchers can forecast climate-related impacts on coastal flooding, food-crop production, biodiversity, and many other factors, which will help in developing effective ways to both combat and adapt to climate change.
Read more about Kraken weather simulations on AMD’s customer reference website.
Making Computing More Energy Efficient
AMD is dedicated to innovating low power and energy efficient computing. As one example, we are a founder and board member of the Green Grid, a global organization dedicated to energy efficiency and sustainability for computing and all aspects of data center operations. Green Grid brings private industry, government, and other organizations together and is widely recognized as a global authority on resource-efficient business computing. AMD also works with organizations on standards for environmentally sustainable technology. One of these is EPEAT® (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool), a rating organization developed through collaboration of business, government, non-profits and academic institutions, which helps purchasers evaluate electronic products based on sustainability guidelines. AMD also actively contributes to government energy efficiency standards, such as the EPA’s Energy Star® program and related programs around the world.