Lenovo is installing a Neptune liquid cooled supercomputer at the Max Planck Society, a delivery that began two months ago and is scheduled to be completed early next year.
The €20 million project includes a 100,000-core Neptune comprised of Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with Intel CPUs (unspecified) and Nvidia Tesla A100 GPUs, software and operational support, increasing the society’s the aggregate peak performance in its HPC complex to 12 PFlop/s. The HPC cluster is water-cooled in two stages – in the first stage, essential components of the boards are cooled with liquid circulated copper piping; in the second stage, the racks are cooled using the Lenovo Rear Door Heat Exchanger (water-cooled rear doors) to dissipate 100 percent of the convection waste heat into the water.
The €20 million project includes a 100,000-core Neptune comprised of Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with Intel CPUs (unspecified) and Nvidia Tesla A100 GPUs, software and operational support, increasing the society’s the aggregate peak performance in its HPC complex to 12 PFlop/s.
According to Lenovo, this “process reduces energy consumption considerably and allows the processors to work at their optimal operating point.” In addition, the two-stage cooling concept increases overall energy efficiency of the cooling system: no heat is dissipated into the ambient air of the data center, which in turn reduces the energy required to keep it cool, the company said.
“What is impressive is the combination of the high performance of the overall system, with its high energy efficiency and high compactness, direct water cooling, low space and infrastructure requirements and high levels of service for both system and application support,” said Dr. Hermann Lederer of Max Planck’s Computing and Data Facility, located near Munich.
“I am very pleased that the Max Planck Society has chosen Lenovo and I have great confidence in our HPC expertise,” said Andreas Thomasch, director HPC and AI, DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), Lenovo Data Center Group. “To equip such an important and internationally recognized institution as MPCDF with a Lenovo system is something special. I am convinced that we are providing researchers with a very powerful and, thanks to Neptune™ water-cooling, highly efficient and sustainable HPC system as an important tool for science.”
