HPC and AI solutions promise a smarter future

Unprecedented Data Acceleration

The Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650-N V2 server is the industry’s first Direct-to-Node (DTN) liquid-cooled server for NVIDIA® A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It includes four board-mounted NVIDIA® A100 GPUs in a 1U system, delivering up to 3PFLOPS of compute performance in a single rack. Lenovo Neptune™ liquid cooling reduces energy consumption by up to 40% while maintaining unprecedented compute power and density.

“Our intense focus on HPC innovation stems from our commitment to our customers, who are working to save human lives and helping solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges” said Scott Tease, General Manager, HPC and AI at Lenovo Data Center Group. “As a result, Lenovo has been recognised as the #1 TOP500 supercomputer provider*, reflecting our commitment to groundbreaking innovation in HPC, Analytics and AI for businesses of any size.”

Breakthrough AI innovation

To drive compute-intensive workloads, Lenovo introduces the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR670 V2, a modular, GPU-rich system that supports up to eight NVIDIA^® A100 Tensor Core GPUs or NVIDIA T4 GPUs in a single 3U frame, delivering up to 160 TFLOPS of compute performance. Included is a model that leverages Lenovo Neptune™ liquid-to-air heat exchangers (no need to add plumbing) to cool four board-mounted NVIDIA^® A100 GPUs, giving customers breakthrough AI performance with the benefit of reduced power consumption and less noise as compared to air cooled systems.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), a German research university, plans to implement a new 17 PFLOPS system, featuring warm water-cooled NVIDIA A100 Ampere GPUs, with the help of Lenovo and business partner Pro-Com in the coming months. Dr. Jennifer Buchmüller, Head of the Department for Scientific Computing and Simulation at KIT said, “We are looking forward to collaborating with Lenovo for our state-of-the-art HoreKa supercomputer, utilising their award-winning Neptune Direct Water Cooling (DWC) technology. The eco-credentials of this solution and the performance optimisation of the overall system is ideally matched with our objective of developing increasingly efficient and sustainable scientific software. This in turn enables multi-scale simulations, significantly larger than we’ve ever done before, for research in the fields of energy and mobility in engineering, material sciences, earth system sciences, life sciences, and particle & astro-particle physics.”

These new Lenovo servers can also take advantage of the extensive software catalog available from NVIDIA NGC, which includes containerised frameworks, applications, pre-trained models, scripts and Helm charts, all of which are freely downloadable. Today, the NVIDIA data center platform accelerates over 700 HPC applications.

Helping solve humanity’s greatest challenges

Using the Lenovo GOAST (Genomics Optimisation and Scalability Tool) system configuration, scientists can leverage a validated, pre-configured bioinformatics solution built on high-performance, high-reliability Lenovo ThinkSystem servers. Traditionally, processing a whole genome (WGS) requires a time scale measured in days, but the Lenovo GOAST (Genomics Optimisation and Scalability Tool) system configuration delivers results in just under an hour using standard x86 hardware.

“With the Lenovo GOAST (Genomics Optimization and Scalability Tool) system, I can analyse more data and uncover new insights faster. Our new HPC environment is powering cutting-edge research that will help us to breed more nutritious, more drought and disease-tolerant, high-yield plants to feed the world,” said Dr. Paritosh Kumar, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants, Department of Genetics, University of Delhi.