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UNLEASHING THE POWER OF AMD’S MI300 SERIES

MI300 Series Hackathon 2025

TESTIMONIALS

We had excellent support from the DiRAC and AMD experts. We particularly appreciated first, having an MI210 provided when it became clear that Julia will not support the MI300A until later this year, and second, being connected to an offsite expert to resolve our problems with profiling Julia. We would also have made little or no progress with converting our code to GPUs without the hackathon as there were many issues that we could not resolve and indeed did not recognise until they were explained to us by the GPU experts.
The AMD DiRAC Hackathon was a very useful workshop to help guide our future decisions regarding the conversion of CPU code to GPU code.
The AMD DiRAC Hackathon was a very useful workshop to help guide our future decisions regarding the conversion of CPU code to GPU code.
Just to say that the whole team was great and were absolutely crucial to the success that we achieved
This event was *extremely* useful to me and my research team. None of us knew much at all about GPUs before the event. Not only did we learn basics about the GPUs and GPU systems, we were able to get our code to run on GPUs quite easily (which we were surprised by) and were able to do a variety of tests as to if the GPU will be useful to our problems in the future. This will help me to develop the code further, write large funding grants and ultimately do more science. This has been the most helpful training event I've gone to since my first MPI training school 20+ years ago. Thank you so much to the Dirac and AMD teams for putting this on! I wish I had done one sooner
This event has given me a lot of insight on GPU usage/coding/hardware and I would definitely recommend this to my colleagues
I really appreciated the hard work of the AMD support team and DiRAC organisers in holding such as a successful event. We were able to improve the performance of our code by almost a factor of 2 with only 3 days of work. I would definitely recommend this hackathon to other teams.
This was a very well run event. Thank you Richard and Laura for ensuring everything went smoothly and everyone was looked after. Thank you RSEs for unending patience with debugging and to the AMD team for so many interesting discussions.
Thoroughly enjoyed this event. Excellent support on the day, great training material. Just great craic.

In-person
UCL – Institute of Education
2 – 4 April 2025

From April 2nd to 4th, 2025, in collaboration with AMD, DiRAC hosted a hackathon at the Institute of Education, UCL, focused on porting and optimising DiRAC codes for the MI300x series. 

Thirty-five in-person participants plus two online attendees organised into ten teams, were supported by two AMD experts, two DiRAC RSEs, and four additional AMD experts via dedicated Slack channels. 

This three-day hackathon offered an excellent opportunity for participants to gain hands-on experience and insights into AMD’s latest technologies, with a particular focus on significant advances in Fortran—a language widely used within our community. 

Access to introductory training through three online sessions (insert link) and early access to resources were crucial to the success of the event. Additionally, setting up dedicated Slack channels for each team, along with one-on-one sessions, allowed teams to discuss their goals and enabled AMD support staff to address potential challenges in advance. 

To wrap up the event, participants gathered for a hot buffet in the Jeremy Bentham Room, providing a chance to network and exchange ideas over food and refreshments, successfully promoting collaboration and strengthening connections. 

Contact

Any questions, please do not hesitate to contact: Richard Regan, DiRAC Training Manager