Combined Company Provides Leading Expertise in Compute and Networking Technologies for High Performance Computing
NVIDIA today announced the completion of its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., for a transaction value of $7 billion.
The acquisition, initially announced on March 11, 2019, unites two of the world’s leading companies in high performance and data center computing. Combining NVIDIA’s leading computing expertise with Mellanox’s high-performance networking technology, the move will enable customers to achieve higher performance, greater utilization of computing resources and lower operating costs.
“The expanding use of AI and data science is reshaping computing and data center architectures,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With Mellanox, the new NVIDIA has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centers. Our combined expertise, supported by a rich ecosystem of partners, will meet the challenge of surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics.”
Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox, said: “This is a powerful, complementary combination of cultures, technology and ambitions. Our people are enormously enthusiastic about the many opportunities ahead. As Mellanox steps into the next exciting phase of its journey, we will continue to offer cutting-edge solutions and innovative products to our customers and partners. We look forward to bringing NVIDIA products and solutions into our markets, and to bringing Mellanox products and solutions into NVIDIA’s markets. Together, our technologies will provide leading solutions into compute and storage platforms wherever they are required.”
Here at the eScience Center we are long time users of products from both vendors and naturally we are excited about the prospect of new products combining the best of two worlds. For example, in highly parallel workloads, the need for fast communication has always been a bottleneck and with the merger between NVIDIA and Mellanox, it will be possible to develop high performance GPUs with built-in network adapters. This will allow for the direct transfer of data from on-card memory to the network, without any intermediate steps. This will reduce both latency and throughput, because the GPUs can talk directly to one another. In the next-generation of supercomputers, such as LUMI and its full-scale exaFLOP successor, which are built primarily using GPUs, these future products could introduce a substantial increase in performance.
