On-demand computing company Liqid wins $20.6M Defense Department contract

BROOMFIELD — The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded a $20.6 million contract to Broomfield-based Liqid Inc. to build what could be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing centers.

In a statement Wednesday, Liqid said it will provide defense agencies with 17 petaflops of processing power through an on-demand system to be installed at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi. 

A petaflop is a measure of computing speed, equal to being able to process one thousand million million, or 10 to the power of 15, floating-point arithmetic calculations per second.

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Liqid said the system would be the 15th-most powerful computing system in the world, based on the current figures from the TOP500 project that ranks supercomputers.

Liqid builds “composable infrastructure” systems, a series of computers that can use specific hardware parts to process a request from a remote customer based on the job needed. For example, a customer needing to render a large video file could take control of high-powered graphics cards stored elsewhere in combination with the RAM and processors at the computer in front of them.

In theory, composable infrastructure allows customers access to additional processing power on demand rather than being limited to the hardware they have nearby or having to install new parts on their computers or servers.

Liqid raised $28 million in a Series B round last November.