Liqid and PIER Group Announce Agreement to Bring Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure Solutions to Research and Education Communities

Liqid, the world’s leading software company delivering data center composability, announced a new agreement with PIER Group to sell Liqid’s line of composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) solutions and services to research and education (R&E) customers. For researchers and IT users developing and deploying data-intensive applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI+ML), 5G/edge, high-performance computing (HPC), densely virtualized environments, and digital media workloads, Liqid maximizes datacenter utilization and CPU/GPU performance.

“In order to remain globally competitive, academic institutions need dynamic, performance-oriented infrastructure that can adapt to the changing demands of modern computing,” said Chad Williams, President, PIER Group. “PIER Group works with organizations like Liqid because their innovative approach to composable infrastructure offers our customers a compelling new direction around the problems associated with static infrastructure models that cannot scale to meet the compute challenges associated with AI+ML and other applications driving advancements across academia, business, and government.”

The addition of the Liqid Matrix CDI platform to PIER Group’s portfolio delivers its network of customers a cost-effective way to disaggregate and pool data center resources such as GPUs, FPGAs, NVME SSDs, persistent memory, and other accelerators via software, allowing the resources to be dynamically configured as bare-metal servers.

With CDI solutions from Liqid, PIER Group’s clients can:

• Accelerate Time-to-Value: Dynamically configure servers in seconds to exactly match workload requirements- event creating configurations that aggregate the power of dozens of GPUs and other accelerators, as required.
• Improve IT Agility: Scale resources like compute, networking, NVMe storage, GPU, FPGA, and persistent memory individually and beyond a server’s physical limitations with just a couple of clicks; when devices are no longer needed by the workload, they are released back to the pool to be used by other applications. Integrate Liqid’s RESTful API with popular tools like SLURM to automate the provisioning of bare‐metal resources.
• Increase Efficiency: Only purchase resources when they’re needed. Extend the life cycle of existing IT server investments- even those without available slots for accelerators like GPUs. Better manage costs associated with data center footprint with greater infrastructure utilization while laying the groundwork for a more sustainable data ecosystem.

“PIER Group’s experience and expertise within the research and education community makes them an outstanding representative for Liqid’s technology,” said Nader Soudah, Vice President, Channel, Liqid. “The relationship gives Liqid the opportunity to meet our customers in the field, enabling them to combine technologies such as CPU, GPU, NVMe, networking, and more to realize greater data center efficiency and performance than ever imagined.”

Liqid offers demos about their latest composable solutions and services at www.liqid.com. Liqid’s case study on the University of Illinois- Chicago, UIC Utilizes Liqid Composable Infrastructure for Uneven Applications in Scientific Research, offers an innovative approach to pooling GPU for AI+ML operations and other computationally intensive workloads.