HPC up-and-comer Liqid has received its third system order from the Department of Defense’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) in a month.
The $20.6 million contract calls for a 17-petaflops ‘composable supercomputing’ system to be deployed at U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 2021.
The system — named Wheat in recognition of Medal of Honor winner Roy M. Wheat — will support a mix of HPC, AI and data analytics workloads to serve HPCMP’s broad user base across the military complex.
On track to be HPCMP’s most powerful system yet, Wheat will span 904 Cascade Lake AP nodes of various configurations (standard, AI/ML, visualization, and high-memory). Altogether, the system comprises 1,808 Xeon Platinum 9242 (Cascade Lake AP) CPUs, 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), and HDR 200 Gbps InfiniBand networking technology.
Liqid’s composable architecture creates a flexible shared resource pool over the PCIe 4.0 bus. “This allows you to take almost any of these nodes and make some of the resources available to other node types in the system via the PCIe switch,” said George Moncrief, chief technologist at ERDC’s DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC), in an interview with HPCwire. Although the CPUs leverage PCIe Gen3, Moncrief noted that the 32 Gpbs PCIe 4.0 pipes are a boon for shared bandwidth, delivered over the switched architecture.
Source: HPC Wire