LOS ANGELES, Calif., Aug. 28, 2020 -- AI Breakthrough, a market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market, announced that Liqid, provider of the composable infrastructure platform, has been selected as winner of the "AI Platform Innovation Award" in the 2020 AI Breakthrough Awards program for Liqid's Command Center composable infrastructure software. The Liqid composable infrastructure platform delivers software-defined, adaptive resource allocation across bare metal via Liqid's ultra-low-latency intelligent fabric to ensure significant increases in data agility, capacity and bandwidth. Liqid Command Center composable infrastructure software delivers dramatic improvements for data center resource utilization and efficiency, including software licenses, to improve overall total cost of ownership and significantly improve data center efficiency. With Liqid Command Center software, resources are directed to whatever application requires them, while hardware can be added as required without having to deploy bundled converged systems that provide uneven performance. Accelerator technologies such as GPU, NVMe, FPGA, storage class memory, and networking can be pooled and deployed at bare metal in previously impossible quantities via Command Center across PCI-Express, Infiniband, and Ethernet.

The Department of Defense has made HPC news twice in the last few days – in one, the Army will spend $32 million on supercomputing technology from composable infrastructure vendor Liqid; in the other, DOD will partner with the Department of Energy and Microsoft to develop AI algorithms to support natural disaster first responders. In the deal with Colorado-based Liqid, the Army has purchased two supercomputers to improve data analytics for organizations "across the military branches requesting such services," according to a story by Andrew Eversen in the online military publication C4ISRNET. The computers will be located at the Army Research Laboratory's DOD Supercomputing Resource Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, according DOD announcement earlier this month. The High Performance Computing Modernization Program, or HPCMP, provides advanced computing capabilities to the DOD's R&D community. "The primary customer base for the (HPCMP) has been the physics-based modeling, which are your weapons designers and that kind of stuff -- it's all based on physics effects," Matt Goss, director of the center, told C4ISRNET.

Composable infrastructure, whereby resources are disaggregated and may be re-composed on the fly, stands to serve a number of key, future-forward IT infrastructure requirements. Resources may be added and then returned for use by a different application on the fly. Those resources can also be better utilized, because they are not left sitting idle, tied to a singular application or system. Serving the most demanding workloads requires a composable architecture that can get granular, essentially treating the IT infrastructure as trays of compute, storage and networking resources down to the levels of graphics processing units (GPUs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), for optimal efficiency. Liqid provides software (The Liqid Command Center) and a top of rack peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) switch that enables bare metal resources (including GPUs, field-programmable gate array (FPGAs), central processing units (CPUs), Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), network interface cards (NICs), and Intel Optane memory) to be disaggregated and then dynamically provisioned over a PCIe fabric.