TACC Accepts Cornelis CN5000 Upgrade to Accelerate Scientific Computing on Stampede3

National Science Foundation-approved deployment upgrades more than 600 compute nodes and delivers up to 71% performance improvements for scientific computing workloads.

Summary:

• TACC formally accepted a CN5000 fabric upgrade supporting the Stampede3 supercomputer.
• Upgrade deploys Cornelis CN5000 networking technology across more than 600 compute nodes.
• Testing using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model demonstrated performance gains ranging from 53% to 71%.
• Deployment enhances performance and scalability for scientific computing workloads serving the U.S. open science and open research community.

WAYNE, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cornelis announced the formal acceptance of a CN5000 networking upgrade supporting a key compute partition within the Texas Advanced Computing Center's (TACC) Stampede3 supercomputer.

The deployment upgrades more than 600 compute nodes to provide improved performance and scalability for scientific computing workloads serving the U.S. open science and open research community. The upgrade helps researchers complete simulations faster and supports increasingly complex research across weather forecasting, engineering, and data-intensive analysis.

"TACC has long been one of the most respected research computing organizations in the world, and we're proud to continue supporting its mission," said Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis. "The acceptance of this upgrade marks another milestone in our collaboration with TACC and reflects our shared commitment to helping researchers tackle increasingly complex scientific challenges."

The acceptance further expands Cornelis' support of one of the world's leading academic supercomputing centers. Stampede3 serves more than 5,000 active researchers each year and powers a wide range of scientific and engineering applications, including weather forecasting, computational science, engineering simulation, and data analytics.

Accelerating Scientific Research

As scientific and engineering workloads continue to grow in complexity, efficient movement of data between compute resources becomes increasingly important to overall application performance.

The CN5000 upgrade enhances a core Stampede3 compute partition, helping improve application performance and enabling more effective use of shared compute resources.

“Researchers rely on Stampede3 to support a wide range of scientific discovery efforts," said Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC. "The successful acceptance of the CN5000 upgrade strengthens an important production partition within the system and helps ensure researchers have access to the performance needed for increasingly demanding workloads. Rigorous acceptance testing is how we ensure this system delivers for the thousands of researchers who depend on it each year, and it reflects the standard we hold for every technology partner we bring into the ecosystem.”

Measurable Application Performance Improvements

Testing using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, one of the HPC community’s most widely used weather and climate applications, demonstrated performance improvements ranging from 53% to 71% across multiple scaling points.

The results highlight how modern networking infrastructure can improve the performance of large-scale scientific applications, enabling researchers to complete simulations faster and maximize available computing capacity.

The upgrade further demonstrates Cornelis’ ability to support leading HPC organizations with networking technologies designed to improve application performance, system efficiency, and scientific productivity.

About Cornelis

Cornelis delivers high-performance, scale-out networking solutions that accelerate AI and HPC workloads. Built on the powerful Omni-Path architecture, Cornelis technology enables lossless, congestion-free networking that reduces training time, improves inference, and maximizes compute utilization. From foundation model training to complex climate modeling and real-time analytics, Cornelis' solutions power the most demanding workloads across commercial, academic, and cloud environments. With a focus on performance, scalability, and efficiency, Cornelis helps organizations achieve faster insights and greater return on infrastructure investments. Learn more at cornelis.com.

FAQ

1. What is Cornelis announcing?
   Cornelis is announcing the formal acceptance of a CN5000 networking upgrade supporting a significant compute partition within TACC's Stampede3 system.
   
   
2. What was upgraded?
   More than 600 Sapphire Rapids-based compute nodes were upgraded to CN5000 networking technology.
   
   
3. What benefits does the upgrade provide?
   The upgrade delivers increased bandwidth, lower latency, and improved application performance for scientific computing workloads running on the upgraded partition.
   
   
4. What performance improvements were observed?
   Benchmarking using the WRF weather forecasting application demonstrated significant application performance improvements compared with the previous networking infrastructure.
   
   
5. Why is this announcement important?
   TACC is one of the world's leading academic supercomputing centers and a highly visible HPC deployment. Formal acceptance of the upgrade demonstrates successful deployment of CN5000 technology in a major production research environment.