Parallel Works, a Chicago company spun out of Argonne National Laboratory, and CoreWeave announced Sept. 9 that they had deployed a managed artificial-intelligence and high-performance-computing environment for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Network of Optimal Dynamic Energy Signatures program, or NODES. The arrangement is intended to give participating researchers access to computing resources for biological modeling without requiring them to build and operate the underlying environment themselves, according to CoreWeave.
Argonne’s role in Illinois research
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, and the largest national laboratory in the Midwestern United States. That public research-laboratory connection provides the institutional context for Parallel Works’ origin, while the NODES deployment itself is being delivered by Parallel Works and CoreWeave for DARPA researchers.
A research platform, not a proven detection system
NODES is a 39-month DARPA Biological Technologies Office initiative focused on using biophysics-guided deep learning to predict protein function from molecular behavior. The program examines how proteins fold, bind and change shape, with the stated goal of characterizing the function of unknown potential biological threats within one hour, according to EverGlade and a DARPA video. That is a research objective, not evidence that the newly deployed environment has already identified a bioweapon.
The program is aimed at a large uncharacterized pool of biological information. EverGlade reports that more than 300 million protein sequences and structures have been cataloged, while fewer than 1% have been functionally characterized through experimental biology. NODES is intended to improve predictions by accounting for molecular dynamics that static representations do not fully capture, the same source says.
What Parallel Works and CoreWeave are providing
The deployment combines Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE control plane with CoreWeave’s dedicated NVIDIA HGX H100 systems, enterprise-scale storage and high-speed NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking, according to the companies’ announcement. ACTIVATE is designed to handle access, provisioning, scheduling, allocations and reporting, giving participating teams a single interface for the computing environment and related technical operations.
The companies say each NODES research team receives a guaranteed allocation within the dedicated computing reservation and can use shared capacity when available. ACTIVATE also provides access to CoreWeave’s Kubernetes services and SUNK, its Slurm-on-Kubernetes offering, while usage reporting and infrastructure monitoring are handled across the platform, according to CoreWeave. Parallel Works CEO Matthew Shaxted said the arrangement is intended to let researchers concentrate on biological analysis instead of routine infrastructure administration; that statement is paraphrased here and was not made in an interview with this publication.
The security authorization behind the deployment
Parallel Works says its ACTIVATE High Security Platform received a Department of Defense Authority to Operate at Impact Level 5 from the High Performance Computing Modernization Program in August 2025. An ATO is an authorization to operate, not itself a security clearance. The company describes the platform as a hybrid, multicloud control plane for defense computing that supports controlled unclassified information and other sensitive workloads, according to its security-platform information.
Where researchers fit into the program
Michigan State University’s Team Green, a group of biophysicists and computer scientists, is among the academic performers working on NODES, according to MSU Today. The new computing environment is intended to give teams such as Team Green access to the resources needed for protein simulation and modeling campaigns. The supplied sources do not independently document the results of those campaigns or establish that the platform has shortened a completed threat assessment.
