AMD announced recently that researchers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment(CHIME) will harness a new GPU accelerator, AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server.

The CHIME project was created to investigate the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up rather than slowing down. Using consumer technologies similar to those found in common radio receivers, the telescope collects radio waves that have travelled through space for up to 11 billion years and feeds them into a massive supercomputer powered by a series of AMD FirePro S9300 x2 GPUs.

Greg Stoner, senior director of Radeon Open Compute, Radeon Technology Group, AMD, said: “We’re proud to participate with the CHIME project in this cosmic opportunity to map the evolution of the Universe. The applications of instinctive computing are expanding rapidly as seen in this fascinating CHIME project, through the use of powerful graphics compute capabilities. Not only is the new AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPU the world’s fastest single-precision GPU accelerator, it is also the world’s first professional GPU accelerator to be equipped with High Bandwidth Memory and the first to fully support the Radeon Open Compute platform – an integral element of the GPUOpen compute initiative.”

The AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPU is a compelling product combining an open source compiler, runtime and driver full access, massive compute performance, and processor density supporting tight power and financial budgets.

“CHIME faces an extraordinary computing task, but with the onset of previously unavailable technology and tools such as the AMD FirePro S9300 x2 GPU” commented Keith Vanderlinde, of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

Derived from a third generation AMD Graphics Core Next(GCN) Architecture, the AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPU delivers up to 13.9 TFLOPS of peak single-precision floating point performance. It is the first GPU for data center use equipped with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).