Case Study: Atomic Weapons Establishment achieves 4x HPC performance and scalable 40GbE networking with Arista Networks

Atomic Weapons Establishment makes significant investment in Arista’s native 40 Gigabit Ethernet switches

The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), the UK government‑owned contractor-operated site responsible for Trident warhead design and maintenance, depends on large-scale simulation and high performance computing (HPC) in place of live testing. Massive datasets, multi-petabyte storage and short refresh cycles outpaced AWE’s legacy network, creating serious throughput and packet‑loss challenges for its scientific and engineering workloads.

AWE partnered with Datrix and Vanix to build a dedicated HPC network based on Arista’s native 40GbE platform—nine Arista 7508E chassis, roughly 400 40GbE optics and Arista EOS—using MLAG/ECMP and aggregated 40GbE links between sites. The deployment removed bottlenecks, delivered about fourfold performance improvement, ensured lossless storage connectivity, improved reliability and scalability (with a clear path to 100GbE), and made AWE one of Europe’s first large-scale 40GbE Arista adopters.

Atomic Weapons Establishment

Neil McMahon

Networking Manager for HPC