Comment by jedbrown

> customers at the national labs are not going to be sharing custom HPC code with AMD engineers

There are several co-design projects in which AMD engineers are interacting on a weekly basis with developers of these lab-developed codes as well as those developing successors to the current production codes. I was part of one of those projects for 6 years, and it was very fruitful.

> I suspect a substantial portion of their datacenter revenue still comes from traditional HPC customers, who have no need for the ROCm stack.

HIP/ROCm is the prevailing interface for programming AMD GPUs, analogous to CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs. Some projects access it through higher level libraries (e.g., Kokkos and Raja are popular at labs). OpenMP target offload is less widespread, and there are some research-grade approaches, but the vast majority of DOE software for Frontier and El Capitan relies on the ROCm stack. Yes, we have groaned at some choices, but it has been improving, and I would say the experience on MI-250X machines (Frontier, Crusher, Tioga) is now similar to large A100 machines (Perlmutter, Polaris). Intel (Aurora) remains a rougher experience.