CoreWeave and Parallel Works Deploy Managed AI Cloud Platform for DARPA NODES Program

Parallel Works, Inc., a provider of managed high-performance computing and AI, and CoreWeave, Inc. (Nasdaq: CRWV), The Essential Cloud for AI, have announced the deployment of a fully managed AI and high-performance computing platform for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures (NODES) program. The platform, delivered through Parallel Works' ACTIVATE control plane and built on CoreWeave's AI cloud infrastructure, is designed to give DARPA researchers immediate access to large-scale computing, orchestration software, and technical support for advanced biological modeling and AI—eliminating the delays and complexity typically associated with building and managing compute environments.

The announcement comes as the rapid adoption of AI continues to reshape scientific research, yet the delivery of AI cloud infrastructure often takes months, delaying research timelines and consuming valuable technical resources. By delivering a fully managed environment, Parallel Works and CoreWeave aim to allow researchers to train AI models and run complex simulations within days rather than weeks or months. NODES addresses complex challenges in the dynamics of biological systems, work that requires large-scale, dependable computing resources and rapid access to dedicated GPU capacity.

"Breakthrough science shouldn't be delayed by infrastructure," said Matthew Shaxted, CEO of 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."

Michael Intrator, co-founder, chairman and CEO of CoreWeave, added: "DARPA takes on many of the country's toughest technical challenges. Our job is to give researchers the computing power to go after them. 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."

The managed environment provides researchers with a dedicated reservation on NVIDIA HGX H100 systems, enterprise-scale storage, and high-speed NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking. Parallel Works ACTIVATE divides the reservation across NODES research teams, so each team holds a guaranteed allocation and can draw on shared capacity when available. Researchers access the environment through a single sign-on, with the ACTIVATE platform combining end-to-end support, unified orchestration, and operational visibility. The platform handles user onboarding, identity and access, provisioning, scheduling, and reporting, with around-the-clock direct-to-expert support for both the platform and researcher applications. It also enables DARPA researchers to access SUNK—CoreWeave's Slurm on Kubernetes offering—and CoreWeave Kubernetes Service (CKS) uniformly from a single platform, allowing workloads of different kinds and sizes to run efficiently in the same underlying compute environment. ACTIVATE manages the accounts, allocations, and sharing policies that determine how research teams use those resources, while CoreWeave's observability stack monitors the health of the underlying fleet so issues are caught at the infrastructure layer before they cost time on multi-week runs.

The deployment underscores a broader trend in which federal defense and science programs are increasingly turning to managed AI cloud environments to accelerate research timelines and reduce the operational burden on scientific teams. By combining dedicated high-performance computing capacity with unified orchestration and operational visibility, the Parallel Works and CoreWeave platform aims to let DARPA NODES performers pursue simulation and modeling campaigns without the delays associated with accessing and managing infrastructure. Parallel Works, which spun out of Argonne National Laboratory in 2015 and is headquartered in Chicago, operates production environments for federal defense and science programs as well as commercial research organizations.