In this video from SC17, Jay Breakstone and Sumit Puri from Liqid describe the company’s innovative composable infrastructure technology for HPC.
At SC17, we announced the Liqid Grid, an intelligent PCI-Express (PCIe) fabric switch, and Liqid Command Center software that enables bare-metal composable infrastructure will be generally available to IT users in Q1-2018. Liqid Grid enables once-static infrastructure to scale on demand to effectively manage the explosion of data associated with cloud, HPC, and AI, as well as other emerging, high-value, data-intensive applications.
At the Liqid booth, the company demonstrated a wide variety of use cases for composability, highlighting how to instantly orchestrate scalable bare-metal GPU and compute solutions for these next-generation HPC workloads.
To achieve true advancements in next-generation data center architecture, static infrastructure must become far more dynamic to accommodate the emerging and often overwhelming new data reality,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Program Director, Computing Platforms, IDC. “Composable infrastructure technologies solve this problem by unlocking resources from their final mechanical limitations and adapting to the data’s unpredictable ebb and flow to achieve new computing frontiers.”
Introducing Liqid Composable – a Composable Infrastructure Platform Enabled by the Liqid Grid and Liqid Command Center
Liqid Composable leverages industry-standard data center components to deliver a flexible, scalable architecture built from pools of disaggregated resources. Compute, network, storage, and graphics processing (GPU) devices are interconnected over PCIe to deliver dynamically configurable bare-metal servers perfectly sized with the exact physical resources required by the application being deployed.
The Liqid Grid, a managed fabric switch, allows core system resources to be instantly interconnected into bare-metal servers through a PCIe fabric and dynamically reconfigured as needed. Liqid Command Center is the powerful management software that automates, orchestrates and composes physical servers from pools of bare-metal resources.
- Liqid Grid (PCIe switching fabric): The ultra-low latency, intelligent and managed PCIe Gen 3.0 switching fabric that electrically interconnects pools of disaggregated system elements.
- Managed PCIe Gen 3.0 switching fabric
- 24-ports of Gen 3.0 x4 (configurable to x8 or x16)
- Bandwidth of 192 GB/s (full duplex)
- Switching latency of ~150 ns
- Scalable fabric expandable to connect thousands of devices
- Liqid Command Center (Software): Composable infrastructure management software that automates, orchestrates and dynamically composes physical bare-metal servers.
- Fabric management software for bare-metal machine orchestration
- Policy-based automation and dynamic provisioning of resources
- Advanced cluster, machine, and device statistics & monitoring
- Multiple control methods including GUI and RESTful API
- Scalable architecture supporting high availability (HA)
Liqid Composable will be available in two different configurations in order to better meet the diverse needs of IT users across vertical markets:
- Liqid Grid with Liqid Command Center: Liqid Grid comes integrated with Liqid Command Center, delivering complete and dynamic control of system resources, enabling true hardware disaggregation and bare-metal server orchestration.
- Developer’s Kit: For customers looking to experience composable infrastructure solutions from Liqid to immediately improve datacenter resource utilization with a turn-key solution, a complete developer’s kit is available. With compute, network, storage and graphics processing devices included in the kit, users are able to begin developing their applications using Liqid Grid and Command Center with a fully integrated, rack-mountable enclosure.
Our industry must accommodate the shift to a dynamic, agile infrastructure better suited to making real-time, AI-driven decisions,” said Jay Breakstone, CEO, Liqid. “Liqid is proud to be at the center of the AI revolution by providing the fundamental building blocks for this paradigm shift. With the general availability of Liqid’s Grid and Command Center, users can take advantage of the industry’s most advanced, adaptive infrastructure to meet data challenges associated with the age of artificial intelligence.”
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