Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) announces new breakthrough high performance computing solutions to help customers of all sizes – across the Middle East and Africa – build a smarter way forward with deep analytics and AI. This will be done by accelerating and optimising their data, delivering faster, more cost-efficient insights and improving AI-based decision making.
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.
“At Lenovo, our commitment is to provide our customers with smarter technology in order to help them compete globally by
supporting them in their digital transformation journey– especially as they try to rebuild their economies post Covid-19. These breakthrough solutions will also assist all customers within the research, science, and healthcare sectors, which aligns with our believe that technology can truly solve humanities biggest challenges.” said Jim Holland, Regional Director and Data Centre Expert at Lenovo DCG. “This transformation will be executed by accelerating and optimising their data; delivering faster, more cost-efficient insights and improving AI-based decision making in the frontline – all while preparing South Africa for the second wave.”
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 Optimisation 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.
To ensure data centers have the required power and cooling capacity for present and future IT plans, Lenovo Professional Services offers new interactive Data Center Best Practices Workshops. By partnering with power and cooling experts, Lenovo can help diagnose IT infrastructures through a series of assessments based on customer needs at no charge for customers, resulting in defining proven methodologies to achieve cooling, power and energy efficiency.
