Boosting Computational Fluid Dynamics Performance with AMD MI300X

Now if only I could purchase one*

*I realize enterprise “GPUs” are difficult to purchase as an individual whether they’re AMD or Nvidia, but AMD might be well-served to mimic their RX 480 strategy (“make a competitive mid-range GPU, distribute it through several board partners, and sell it at rock-bottom prices to get it to as many customers as possible”). If there’s a compelling reason to use AMD hardware over Nvidia, the software support will come. As an extreme example, if one could purchase an MI300X for $50 a pop, surely FAANG and others would invest time and effort into the software side to leverage the cost savings vs Nvidia, who is unquestionably price-gouging due to their monopolistic hold on the enterprise GPU market.

Our team has access to multiple systems that either have MI250Xs or H100s. Getting stuff to work with AMD/ROCm is substantially more effort than the NVIDIA/CUDA experience.

Some of this is lack of groundwork/engineering by packages or system administrators, but it seems a decent amount is the relative lack of effort by AMD to make things work well OOTB.

warning - no pretty videos in this post