HPE is bringing multi-tenancy software updates across its HPC stack to ISC High Performance 2026 in Germany, anchored by a Slingshot 400 fabric that delivers 51.2 Tb/sec of aggregate bandwidth and supports 260,000 endpoints across a three-level network, HPE said.

The Slingshot 400 ASIC uses 100 Gb/sec SerDes with PAM-4 modulation and supports 64 ports at 400 Gb/sec. Cable splitters stretch the port count to 128 at 200 Gb/sec and 256 at 100 Gb/sec. The chip slots into Cray EX4000, Cray GX5000, Cray XD, and ProLiant server platforms, with a matching dual-port mezzanine NIC for Cray EX and GX and a single-port PCI-Express 5.0 NIC for Cray XD and ProLiant.

At ISC, HPE released an updated Slingshot 400 software build that adds multi-tenancy functions separating users and restricting unauthorized routing from open-source and third-party groups. HPE says the new capabilities apply to switches already deployed in customer environments.

Storage gets a new GUI and API for multi-tenancy setup and management on Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems E2000 parallel file systems. The GUI simplifies multi-tenant configuration. The API automates large-scale rollouts.

What is HPE shipping at the show?

The core ISC announcement is the Supercomputing Programming Software suite, which folds vendor, open-source, and HPE tools into one programming environment. HPE delivers software tool updates as containerized environments, removing the rebuild step when moving between systems. HPE extends the environment to ProLiant DL and XD servers optimized for AI training, tuning, and inference.

The software-first push lands one week after HPE Discover 2026 in Las Vegas, where executives outlined confidential computing additions to the Morpheus management platform, air-gapped Private Cloud AI features for sovereignty, and AI-native networking and firewall capabilities. Damkroger's ISC messaging runs in the same direction.

Why does sovereign AI dominate the messaging?

Trish Damkroger, HPE's SVP and GM of HPC and AI infrastructure solutions since 2022, has more than three decades in HPC across Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and five-plus years at Intel. She framed the ISC announcements around sovereign AI — owning the infrastructure, models, and data — as agentic AI expands the threat surface.

"Sovereign is still about control, compliance, and security, but AI adds so many more layers of threat," Damkroger said during an interview at HPE Discover 2026. "We are used to being air-gapped, so you can reduce that attack surface from external threats."

Air-gapping alone no longer closes the gap. Damkroger pointed to autonomous workloads as the new risk vector.

"With AI, you could put together the infrastructure, maybe you air-gap it, maybe you do other things to control who has access to it, but what about the agents?" she asked. "Now we have agents running on and doing some of our work for us. We're talking about the classification of agents on these different machines. It's really about who has access."

How does this fit the broader HPE roadmap?

The software announcements build on the Cray GX5000 platform unveiled a month before SC25 and three new Cray blades introduced at SC25 in November 2025. Direct liquid cooling targets second-generation exascale systems. The Cray Supercomputing Storage Systems K3000 and the Slingshot 400 interconnect in GX5000 landed alongside the architecture.

At ISC, HPE extended the software umbrella down through networking and storage.

"We've really looked at in the software stack and said, 'OK, these are the new requirements and multi-tenancy all the way down through our storage and networking,'" Damkroger said. "Software is the big thing that we're announcing, in the whole multi-tenancy all the way through the system, so not just on the compute, but networking and storage. That's all about security."

Damkroger closed on the operational pressure customers face.

"I feel for our customer base because there's so much change," she said. "The pace of AI is so much faster than anything we've ever faced before and the new tools are, again, great, but they're also a threat because they're going to be used against you."

HPE works with Nvidia, AMD, and Intel on security "down to the core," and supplies an external root of trust for source verification, Damkroger said. Quantum computing now sits inside the HPC and AI convergence conversation, adding another layer for compliance teams to track.