Liqid, provider of the world's most comprehensive composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform, announced dynamic Slurm Workload Manager integration for its Liqid Matrix Software, delivering another powerful tool for HPC deployments that further optimizes resource utilization for and by artificial intelligence (AI).

"Composable Infrastructure is critical when research needs across an organization vary in requirement and scale. At the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL), we are developing programmable interfaces for controlling composable hardware, providing user managed hardware and programmatic integrations," said Lance Long, Senior Research Manager responsible for infrastructure solutions at EVL and support for research in the College of Engineering, both part of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "The new Slurm integration by Liqid helps better manage deployments of bare metal and containerized workloads and services for the composable infrastructure community."

Automation for the People: Liqid + Slurm Deliver Unprecedented Resource Adaptivity for AI-driven HPC Environments

Using the Slurm integration, Liqid dynamically composes servers for a job on submission, from pools of compute, storage, and GPU resources via Liqid Matrix Software, delivering precise bare-metal configurations for each HPC job. With the resources composed to match the needs of the job, rather than a best fit of standard configurations, Liqid matrix software frees stranded resources. When a job is completed, the resources for the composed system are returned to the pools and can be automatically redeployed via Liqid Matrix for a future job.

Slurm integration with Liqid Matrix allows for the further automation of backend operations such as evolving hardware and server types. Slurm also gives data scientists and researchers full visibility into the Liqid multiverse of all the possible systems that can be configured from available pooled resources at any given time. Newly acquired, disaggregated resources are seamlessly recognized and represented in the pool as they are deployed without the downtime associated with traditional hardware upgrades.

GPUs, NVMe storage, NICs, HBAs, FPGAs, and storage-class memory can be aggregated and deployed in minutes via Liqid Matrix Software. Bare-metal resources can be shared and composed across intelligent fabrics in the exact ratios required for a given workload at massive scale or down to the level of individual component. In addition, with Liqid Matrix Software technologies such as GPU, peer-to-peer connectivity can be enabled with the same efficiency as though the resources were local to the server. Tight integration and agility enable Liqid Matrix Software and Slurm to deliver industry-leading performance with the tightest possible physical footprint.

Data scientists, IT administrators, DevOps teams, and other stakeholders can provision for jobs that vary in infrastructure requirements without requiring discrete static configurations to meet the demands of each heterogeneous workload. Combining Slurm and Liqid composable disaggregated infrastructure, users will realize decreased time to value for the development of vaccines and medicines, breakthroughs in global communications and data security, improvements in autonomous logistics and global supply chain operations, wider implementation of effective 5G networks, and other important innovations that hinge on making sense of massive, evolving data sets.

"With Slurm integration, Liqid delivers unprecedented performance and architectural adaptivity for data center environments utilizing HPC configurations laced together with increasingly complex artificial intelligence to solve the world's most urgent problems," said Sumit Puri, CEO & Cofounder, Liqid. "The ability to automate resources to rapidly scale as applications demand it, regardless of where researchers are physically located, means the pace of global research can increase with the same available resources due to increased efficiency and flexibility, accelerating critical data analytics and time to market."

Download How Composable Infrastructure Addresses IT's Problem of Space and Time from Evaluator Group and learn the benefits of Liqid's composable disaggregated infrastructure when compared to HPE Synergy.