SAN DIEGO, Calif., Oct. 28, 2022 — GigaIO has announced its collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in promoting the Prototype National Research Platform (PNRP), an $11.25M, first-of-its-kind, fully composable cyberinfrastructure ecosystem for the National Science Foundation (NSF). The two will provide an update on the deployment of the PNRP at a panel in the SDSC booth (#3025) at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22) in Dallas, Texas, on Tuesday, November 15, at 11:00am.

“We are excited to update the community on the deployment and testing of one of our most innovative HPC systems, the National Research Platform,” said Frank Würthwein, PI for the NSF-funded PNRP and director of SDSC. “PNRP brings together several cutting-edge hardware and software technologies to meet the demands of next generation science and engineering research.”

PNRP comprises three subsystems, an HPC subsystem located at SDSC with a composable infrastructure from GigaIO that features the company’s low latency universal dynamic memory fabric, FabreX, and two FP32 systems sited at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. SDSC chose Applied Data Systems (ADS) as the system integrator for the HPC system and Supermicro for the FP32 system. The HPC system consists of 64 NVIDIA FP64 GPUs, 32 Xilinx Alveo FPGAs, along which NVMe storage, x86 compute servers, and FabreX infrastructure. Each of the FP32 systems has 144 NVIDIA A10 GPUs and a complement of x86 servers and local storage. Additionally, there are eight data caches distributed nationally, which are part of a content delivery network for improving access to and movement of experimental and simulation data.

FabreX was selected as the technology of choice for the PNRP HPC subsystem because SDSC was looking for an innovative, all-in-one cyberinfrastructure ecosystem of computing resources, research and education networks, edge computing devices, and other instruments. The install is designed as a testbed to expedite science and enable transformative discoveries in a wide variety of areas, such as public health, high energy physics, and wildfire response, and is currently going into production.

Building on the successes of prior collaborations, SDSC chose GigaIO for its first composable implementation. “Our diverse areas of research require that we aggregate disparate computational elements, such as FPGAs, GPUs, x86 processors, and storage systems, into highly usable and reconfigurable systems,” said Würthwein. “GigaIO’s FabreX technology makes it possible to dynamically bring these elements together in a very low-latency, high-performance interconnect while allowing for distinct, non-interfering workflows to co-exist on the same infrastructure.”

The fundamentally open nature of the GigaIO platform complements SDSC’s aspirations for the new research platform to be an open system for scientists nationwide. “The PNRP is an open system designed for growth and inclusion,” added Würthwein, “a way for academic institutions to join a national system and, through their participation, enlarge and enrich the HPC ecosystem.”

“We are proud that GigaIO’s composability continues to make a difference in scientific research,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. “GigaIO’s broader mission is to democratize access to AI and HPC resources by enabling the sharing of expensive computing resources previously trapped and stranded inside static data center infrastructure. Building the PNRP really delivers on that promise.”

“Our robust partner ecosystem made it possible to bring this project to life,” noted Jacqueline Arsivaud, VP Marketing of GigaIO. “A project such as this provides ample opportunities to collaborate with both technology partners, such as AMD and NVIDIA, as well as a system integrator partner in ADS, and underscores our commitment to working 100% through the channel.”

For more details and to learn how FabreX can help data scientists get to results faster by bringing the agility of the cloud to their infrastructure at a fraction of the cost, watch the recent SDSC video, “Heterogeneous Computing and Composable Architectures with Next-Gen Interconnects,” visit www.gigaio.com to schedule an online demo, or stop by the GigaIO booth (#539) during SC22 for an in-person demo.

About GigaIO

GigaIO provides workload-defined infrastructure through its dynamic memory fabric, FabreX, which seamlessly composes rack-scale resources and integrates natively into industry-standard tools. FabreX lets customers build impossible servers for HPC + AI workflows — from storage to accelerators to memory — at a fraction of cloud TCO, by optimizing the utilization and efficiency of their existing hardware, allowing them to run more workloads faster at lower cost through higher utilization of resources and more agile deployment. Visit www.gigaio.com.

About SDSC

The San Diego Supercomputer Center is a leader and pioneer in high-performance and data-intensive computing, providing cyberinfrastructure resources, services, and expertise to the national research community, academia, and industry. Located on the UC San Diego campus and serving the University of California system and beyond, SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from astrophysics and earth sciences to disease research and drug discovery.

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Source: GigaIO