PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) is too deliver the high-performance computer (HPC) infrastructure for SURF, the ICT cooperative for education and research in the Netherlands. The €20 million project, which begins in early 2021, will result in what is considered the creation of the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the country.
Supporting scientists from over 100 education and research institutions throughout the Netherlands, the supercomputer will power highly complex calculations in life-enhancing work across all fields of science including meteorology, astrophysics, medical and social sciences, and materials and earth sciences, such as climate change research.
Walter Lioen, Research Services Manager at SURF, said: “The need of researchers for computing power, data storage and processing is growing exponentially. In the design of the new supercomputer, the usability for scientific research was paramount. SURF has chosen Lenovo because of its quality, performance and future flexibility, as well as its considerations for sustainability.”
Lenovo HPC technology will include Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors and ThinkSystem servers powered by future generation AMD EPYC processors, and all being cooled by Lenovo Neptune water cooling technology. 12,4 Pebibyte (PiB) of Lenovo Distributed Storage Solution (DSS-G) and servers with NVIDIA HGX A100 4-GPU will also assist with the artificial intelligence and machine learning abilities required for SURF’s innovative research. NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand, with smart in-network computing acceleration engines, provide the extremely low latency, high data throughput networking. Running at ten-times the capacity of the previous system and achieving an overall peak performance of almost 13 PFLOPs, Lenovo’s smarter infrastructure will deliver a powerful, highly efficient and sustainable tool for scientists and researchers in the future.
Energy efficiency through water-cooling technology
Lenovo’s water-cooling technology will remove approximately 90% of the heat from the system, reducing overall energy consumption, significantly increasing overall efficiency and ultimately allowing the processors to perform at their peak.
Tina Borgbjerg, General Manager for Benelux and Nordics, Lenovo DCG, says, “We’re so pleased to contribute to a project that will not only enrich scientific research in the Netherlands but deliver a smarter and more energy-efficient system, thanks to our incredible water-cooling technology. The sheer power that will be delivered by this national supercomputer showcases our strength in HPC, and the scale of this deal further demonstrates our commitment to the Benelux region and the Netherlands.”
“Our A100 Tensor Core GPUs featured in SURF are based on NVIDIA Ampere architecture, an engineering milestone that boosts performance for Artificial Intelligence (AI) training and inference, as well as easily meeting the access and power demands of the modern AI and HPC workloads,” said Ian Buck, General Manager and Vice President of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “Incorporating the world’s most advanced AI technology, all connected by high-bandwidth, low-latency NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking, into the SURF supercomputer gives researchers what they need to quickly and effectively take on the workloads of the exascale AI era.”
The modernisation of the infrastructure will begin in February 2021 and phase 1 of the new supercomputer is expected to be operational by mid-2021.
Read the latest edition of PCR’s monthly magazine below:
Like this content? Sign up for the free PCR Daily Digest email service to get the latest tech news straight to your inbox. You can also follow PCR on Twitter and Facebook.
