HPE, Mellanox to Provide Interconnect, Liquid-Cooled Platforms for NASA Ames’ Supercomputer

NASA has selected Mellanox Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise to supply interconnect and liquid-cooled platforms for a high-performance computing cluster at the space agency’s Ames Research Center in California.

HPE will deliver its SGI 8600 liquid-cooled system and combine it with Mellanox’s EDR InfiniBand interconnect platform for integration with Ames’ Electra supercomputer, Mellanox said Monday.

Both companies will install the platforms on the supercomputing system by the second half of 2017.

The supercomputer’s expansion seeks to leverage HPE’s Enhanced Hypercube topology system used in Ames’ Pleiades supercomputer as well as Mellanox’s in-network computing platform and ConnectX-5 interconnect offering.

“HPE has coupled its Hypercube topology with the new ConnectX-5 interface to enable system expansion without the use of external switches,” said Craig Yamasaki, director of product management for HPC and artificial intelligence at HPE.