The acquisition will bring together two leading companies in high performance computing (HPC). NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and they have every major cloud service provider and computer maker as customers.
The data and compute intensity of modern workloads is growing exponentially and has put enormous performance demands on hyperscale and enterprise datacentres. However, as computing demand is surging, CPU performance advances are slowing as Moore’s law has ended. This has led to the adoption of accelerated computing using NVIDIA GPUs and Mellanox’s intelligent networking solutions.
Datacentres in the future are expected to be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, and will be designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance.
Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacentres.
With the acquisition of Mellanox, NVIDIA will be able to optimise datacentre-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilisation and lower operating cost for customers.
“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fuelling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacentres,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacentre-scale compute engine.
“We’re excited to unite NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform with Mellanox’s accelerated networking platform under one roof to create next-generation datacentre-scale computing solutions."”
“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures.”