Lenovo has signed a contract for the joint construction of a new high performance computing (HPC) cluster with the University of Paderborn in Germany. The system integrates the latest Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with a particular focus being placed on improving energy efficiency.
► HPC system integrates Lenovo ThinkSystem servers
► Advanced Neptune water cooling also used in tailored design
The system, which will be installed at the at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, will make use of the Lenovo ThinkSystem SD665 V3 server and AMD CPU technology. For the GPU nodes, the ThinkSystem SD665-N V3 server featuring four NVIDIA H100 GPUs will be used . The total number of cores across the system will be more than 136,000.
A tailored cooling solution will be used to meet the specific energy saving requirements of the project. This will incorporate innovative Lenovo technologies such as Neptune warm water cooling which uses water-cooled power supplies and fully-insulated racks and enables over 97% of the generated heat to be directly transferred to warm water circulation instead of the data centre. It also drives more efficient processor operation through the use of heat exchangers and coolant distribution units. The system also makes partial use of Open-Loop technology to connects CPUs in the 1U and 2U servers to water cooling.
The integration of the new system will be carried out by the HPC partner pro-com DATENSYSTEME with installation scheduled to take place in the second half of the year. It is expected to have a runtime of at least five years.
The new HPC system, with approximately double the computing power, will complement the current Noctua 2 supercomputer at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing. It will also be accessible to other researchers and scientists at the University of Paderborn. From 2025, one of its main roles will be to support a national HPC research programme into atomistic simulation and other important fields.
In a separate development, the General Purpose Partition of the MareNostrum 5, a new pre-exascale supercomputer running on Lenovo’s HPC infrastructure, has been classified as the top x86 general-purpose cluster on the recently published TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers globally. The largest of its kind in the world, the General-Purpose Partition is ranked at #19 on the TOP500 list overall. It also makes use of Lenovo’s Neptune liquid cooling technology and was specifically designed to solve complex scientific problems through resource sharing and running multiple tasks simultaneously.
On the Green500 list, the Flatiron Institute’s Henri system continues to hold the number one spot for the world’s most energy efficient supercomputer, powered by Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SR670 V2 with Intel Xeon Platinum and NVIDIA H100. Lenovo also added another system to the Green500’s top ten with South Korea’s Institute for Basic Sciences system, composed of Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 with AMD EPYC processors, NVIDIA H100 and Infiniband NDR 400.
