SC24 Oxide Computing's 2,500 pound (1.1 metric ton) rackscale blade servers are getting a new home at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore N

LLNL looks to make HPC a little cloudier with Oxide's rackscale compute platform

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2024-11-18 14:30:06

SC24 Oxide Computing's 2,500 pound (1.1 metric ton) rackscale blade servers are getting a new home at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNLL).

The partnership, announced at the annual Supercomputing event, SC24, in Atlanta on Monday comes as the lab looks to embrace a cloudier approach to on-prem high performance computing.

As compute stacks go, Oxide's are more than a little unusual. Rather than a typical 19-or 21-inch cabinets common in enterprise and hyperscale datacenters, Oxide's rack is really more of a chassis that houses 32 compute nodes. If you notice a general lack of cabling, that's because each of those nodes is interconnected by an integrated backplane that provides not just power but 12.8Tbps of switching capacity to boot.

A full rack comes equipped with some 2048 AMD Epyc cores, 16TB of RAM, no shortage of NVMe storage, and has a rated power draw of up to 15 kilowatts. But pull out one of the hyperscale inspired systems and you'll realize much of the underlying hardware is custom as well. For one, there's no ASpeed BMC on board. Instead, Oxide developed its own that runs a Rust-based operating system called Hubris.