Liqid, provider of the world's most-comprehensive composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform, has been awarded a contract with the Department of Defense (DoD) US Army Corps of Engineers to provide composable GPU-driven supercomputing resources. The $20.6 million contract is for a 17-petaflop composable supercomputing system that will be deployed at the US Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Liqid's adaptive architecture enables the Corps of Engineers to change hardware configurations as necessary, and better accommodate the performance requirements of uneven, unpredictable workloads associated with graphics-intensive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. At this time, the performance capabilities of the Liqid deployment would rank the system at number 15 on the TOP500 ranking of the world's most powerful high-performance computing (HPC) platforms.

"Composable, disaggregated infrastructure solutions provide an adaptive supercomputing ‘backbone' for the physical infrastructure challenges faced daily by engineers at ERDC," said Eric Slack, Hyperconverged, Integrated Systems, and SDS Analyst, Evaluator Group. "AI helps the US Army deliver essential military and civilian engineering services around the world. Composable HPC will manage their hardware footprint more efficiently and achieve the kind of adaptive data performance necessary to address data-intensive workloads that have different requirements at varying stages."

The integration of Liqid's CDI platform with the groundbreaking Intel^® Xeon^® Scalable Platinum 9200 CPUs and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs provides the data agility and efficiency required to meet the challenges associated with uneven, data-intensive AI workloads. The innovative Intel Xeon processor series sets a new level of platform convergence and capabilities across compute, storage, memory, network, storage-class memory technology, and security. The Intel Xeon platform will enable ERDC to design physical infrastructure that can withstand disasters and improve economies.

With Liqid's Composable Fabric, ERDC can compose the exact amount of NVIDIA A100 GPU performance directly into the platform, and fully support AI workload requirements as needed. Users can dynamically orchestrate any CPU-to-GPU ratio, and incorporate other accelerators across PCI-Express Gen 4.0, Infiniband, and Ethernet fabrics for a perfectly balanced system. Liqid's orchestration software dynamically composes GPUs, NVMe SSDs, networking, and storage-class memory to create software-defined bare-metal servers on demand. This enables unparalleled resource utilization to deliver previously impossible performance for AI-driven data analytics operations.

Additionally, the data agility that composable disaggregated infrastructure makes available does not come at the cost of performance. Ultra-fast NVIDIA A100 GPUs and Liqid composable NVMe storage can be aggregated and deployed via software without regard to physical limitations, and shared across intelligent fabrics in the exact ratios required for a given workload. This means that data operations such as NVMe, and even GPU-over-Fabric (NVME/GPU-oF) can be done with the same efficiency as those that take place up and down the hardware stack for industry-leading performance with the tightest possible physical footprint.

The composable disaggregated HPC system from Liqid includes:

• The Liqid CDI platform
• 86,784 Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 compute cores
• 536 NVIDIA A100 GPUs
• 391 terabytes of memory
• 4.5 petabytes of Liqid all-flash NVMe-oF parallel file system storage (to be integrated with existing storage filesystem)
• NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand Smart Networking

"The team at Liqid is proud our composable infrastructure solutions are now providing the kind of high-performance computing environment the Corps of Engineers' requires to address 21st century engineering challenges associated with maintaining and improving physical infrastructure, and protecting against natural and human-made disasters," said Sumit Puri, CEO & Cofounder, Liqid. "As supercomputers around the world rely increasingly on GPUs to provide essential data capacity and performance, the ability to utilize that resource across multiple fabrics in the largest pools possible is of vital importance. By choosing Liqid CDI solutions, the DoD can better utilize these resources to help secure the world against what comes next with one of the world's most powerful supercomputers."