Liqid Wins $32 Million Contract With US Department of Defense

Liqid, Inc. announces the delivery and acceptance of the largest composable HPCs by the US Department of Defense (DoD).

It served as the prime contractor for the $32 million contract, delivering 2 systems to the Army Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (ARL DSRC). These systems boast the largest composable GPU pools WW, with 360 NVIDIA A100 GPUs. This capability enables the ARL DSRC to meet their HPC needs with speed and flexibility, provisioning, scaling, and reallocating GPUs on-demand via software. The operations will be overseen by the HPC Modernization Program (HPCMP), which provides HPC resources, expertise, and infrastructure to support the scientific, engineering, and computational needs of the DoD.

The ARL DSRC is an advanced facility dedicated to supercomputing and computational science, serving a diverse and extensive user base within the DoD research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) communities. Located at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, it operates under the Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC), US Army Research Laboratory, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD). The CCDC ARL DSRC’s primary mission is to provide HPC, advanced networking, and computational science tools, along with expertise, to support the RDT&E efforts of the DoD.

The 2 composable HPCs at the ARL DSRC are named “Jean” and “Kay” in honor of Jean Bartik and Kay McNulty, esteemed programmers of the pioneering ENIAC, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer in the US.

ARL DSRC Composable HPC Technical Specs:  

Jean:

• Liqid Matrix CDI Platform
• 588 Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 Nodes
• 264 NVIDIA A100 GPUs
• 313 TB of memory
• 15.6 PB of all-flash NVMe-oF parallel file system storage
• HDR 200Gb IB Fabric

Kay:

• Liqid Matrix CDI Platform
• 488 Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 Nodes
• 96 NVIDIA A100 GPUs
• 226 TB of memory
• 12.9 PB of all-flash NVMe-oF parallel file system storage
• HDR 200Gb IB Fabric

“Modern AI/ML workloads demand massive GPU performance. By choosing Liqid, ARL can optimize the use of these powerful and invaluable resources to deliver results with utmost efficiency,” said Sumit Puri, CEO and co-founder.

Liqid’s Matrix composable platform empowers users to manage, scale, and configure physical, bare-metal HPC systems within seconds, allowing for reallocation of core data center devices based on evolving workflows and business requirements. Liqid Matrix enables dynamic rightsizing of IT resources on the fly, ensuring optimal utilization.

“We are thrilled to power the US DoD with the world’s largest composable HPCs. Our unwavering commitment is to assist our customers in tackling their most pressing computing challenges with unmatched agility and speed,” added Puri.