Canonical announced an expanded collaboration with AMD to package and maintain AMD ROCm software directly in Ubuntu. The company says AMD ROCm is an open software ecosystem to enable hardware-accelerated Artificial Intelligence/ML and HPC workloads on AMD Instinct and AMD Radeon GPUs. Canonical frames the effort as a way to simplify deployment of Artificial Intelligence infrastructure while providing long term support.
To support the initiative, Canonical has formed a dedicated team of engineers tasked with packaging the AMD ROCm software libraries. The team will focus on streamlining installation, support, and long-term maintenance of the ROCm packages on Ubuntu, according to the announcement. Packaging the libraries within the Ubuntu archive is presented as a way to reduce friction for operators and developers deploying GPU-accelerated workloads.
Canonical also said it will submit the packaged ROCm libraries for consideration on Debian. The company highlighted long term support as part of the value proposition of integrating ROCm directly into Ubuntu, positioning the collaboration with AMD as a route to more straightforward management of GPU-accelerated Artificial Intelligence, ML, and HPC software stacks on supported systems.
