Parallel Works, Inc., a pioneer in managed high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence solutions, and CoreWeave, Inc., The Essential Cloud for AI™, have announced a strategic deployment of a fully managed AI and HPC platform designed specifically for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The technology environment supports DARPA’s Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program, cutting through the operational friction of provisioning and scaling infrastructure so researchers can focus entirely on cutting-edge biological modeling.
Accelerating Discovery by Eliminating Infrastructure Roadblocks
In scientific research, traditional AI cloud onboarding can often take months, creating bottlenecks that delay critical breakthroughs. By integrating Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE control plane with CoreWeave’s specialized AI cloud infrastructure, the joint initiative condenses deployment timelines from months down to mere days. Researchers can rapidly execute complex simulations, train foundational models, and process high-throughput workloads without the burden of building or maintaining the underlying computational stack.
“Breakthrough science shouldn’t be delayed by infrastructure,” said Matthew Shaxted, CEO, Parallel Works. “DARPA needs researchers focused on biology, not on building infrastructure or managing compute environments. By combining CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform with the ACTIVATE platform, we’re giving NODES teams immediate access to the AI resources they need so they can spend their time advancing research.”
“DARPA takes on many of the country’s toughest technical challenges. Our job is to give researchers the computing power to go after them,” said Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman and CEO of CoreWeave. “We’ve spent years building an AI cloud that the world’s leading AI labs and AI-native companies depend on. With Parallel Works, we’re bringing those same capabilities to the NODES program.”
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Architected for Complex Biological Modeling
The DARPA NODES initiative focuses on unraveling intricate dynamics within biological systems tasks requiring reliable, ultra-high-density compute capacity. Through this managed deployment, program performers receive instant access to dedicated GPU infrastructure through a secure single sign-on experience.
The architecture features four key capabilities delivered via the ACTIVATE platform:
• End-to-end operational support: Parallel Works is responsible for ecosystem management, encompassing activities such as user onboarding, identity and access management, provisioning, scheduling, and reporting services. Access to technical experts 24/7 guarantees smooth running of both platform and scientific applications.
• Reserved High Performance Compute: The platform offers reserved access to NVIDIA HGX H100 computational clusters along with enterprise storage systems and NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking. ACTIVATE takes care of guaranteed allocations per team while managing shared capacity use throughout the program.
• Centralized Workload Orchestration: Researchers will be able to use SUNK (Slurm on Kubernetes technology of CoreWeave) as well as CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS) within one interface to run different scale workloads.
• Operational Visibility: ACTIVATE offers researchers and administrators visibility of resource consumption metrics.
Concurrently, CoreWeave’s background observability suite actively monitors node-level cluster health to resolve hardware anomalies before they disrupt multi-week scientific runs.
Further information regarding the DARPA Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) initiative is available on the official DARPA NODES Program Page.
