Photo above: Mellanox’ AI platform protects supercomputers from from hacking and inappropriate use

In a first joint announcement by Nvidia and Mellanox, the two companies announced a reference design for the rapid building of supercomputers, and a new cyber protection platform for supercomputers. Mellanox has expanded its offering of Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) products, adding to it a new appliance called UFM Cyber-AI Platform.

It provides cyber protection to supercomputers and big data centers, using an artificial intelligence software that studies the behavior characteristics of the computing systems, to identify malfunctions and detects abnormal activity that implies on hacking and unauthorized activity.

Originally, UFM technology was developed a decade ago by Mellanox in order to manage InfiniBand-based communications systems by providing network telemetry data, monitoring the activity of all the related devices, and managing the software updates across the network’s components.

The new solution comes both as a software package or as a complete appliance based on Nvidia’s dedicated server. It is focused on characterizing computer operation and identifying unusual activity. According to Nvidia and Mellanox, the system significantly reduces the data center’s downtime, whose damages are estimated to reach $300,000 per hour.

Supercomputers are open and unprotected platforms

According to Mellanox’s VP of Marketing, Gil Shainer, the integration of Mellanox’s InfiniBand with Nvidia’s GPU changes the rules of the game in the supercomputer market, bringing to it unprecedented cyber security and preventative maintenance capabilities. Shainer: “Supercomputers are managed differently from organizational computer centers. Usually it is an open platform that need to provide easy access to many researchers around the world.”

To illustrate the dilemma he recalled an event that took place several years ago at an American university. “The administrator of the computers center told me how they caught a student using a computer for crypto mining. The suspicion emerged when they found out that the computer’s power consumption was not declining during the annual vacation, a period of time in which the computer usually is not active. Our solution allows you to detect such a situation right away – and not have to wait for your computer’s power bill.”

Reference Design for the Rapid Construction of Supercomputer

Alongside the joint announcement, Nvidia unveiled a new supercomputer called Selene (photo above), which is considered the strongest industrial supercomputer in the United States, with peak performance of 27.5 petaflops. The computer is based on the new A100-model GPU processors announced this week, and was built for internal research conducted in Nvidia. During a press briefing last week, Shainer revealed that the new computer was built in just one month, a record-breaking time for the construction of a supercomputer.

Shainer: “The ability to build a supercomputer in a month is based on expertise in communication and expertise in processors. We have developed a reference design that allows anyone to build a supercomputer, based on ready made blocks of Nvidia’s processors and Mellanox’s communication. Because the processors are fully compatible with the communications cards, the computer can be set up in no time. In fact, we have jointly developed a reference design that allows for the construction of computers of any size – not just supercomputers.”