Liqid and Orange Silicon Valley have teamed up to create a prototype for a “composable” graphics supercomputer. That means it is a computer built with graphics chips that can scale from a small size to a very large size based on the demands of its users. The companies believe it could be used as an on-demand infrastructure for artificial intelligence, deep learning, virtual reality, and graphics rendering.
It’s one more project that could make companies more agile when they tap computing resources. In this case, a single server could have one graphics chip or many. The companies are showing off the prototype supercomputer as a demonstration of the next generation of graphics processing unit (GPU) computers, which can be used to render high-end graphics akin to something like Pixar’s next animated film. They are showing the demo at the Supercomputing 2017 conference in Denver, Colorado, this week.