NextScale Nodes Crest 1 Teraflops, Await Knights Landing

By Timothy Prickett Morgan

November 19, 2014

When the dust settles after its acquisition of the System x business from IBM, Lenovo Group will probably end up with the second largest HPC systems business in the world, behind Hewlett-Packard and eager to close that gap just as it has in the PC market. Lenovo came out swinging at the SC14 supercomputing conference in New Orleans this week with a new water-cooled NextScale modular system sporting over-clocked “Haswell” Xeon E5-2560 v3 processors and positioning this machine to accept Intel’s “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors when they ship in the second half of next year.

Lenovo is also starting up an HPC innovation center in Stuttgart, Germany, to leverage the expertise in key supercomputing centers in Europe to drive its roadmap going forward.

Before Lenovo acquired the System x division, IBM was working on a water-cooled variant of the NextScale modular system that would allow for dense packaging of compute and memory and also allow for warm water cooling of the system. Energy efficiency is a particular need for supercomputing centers, and in Europe, where electricity is more expensive and so is real estate (speaking very generally), wasting energy and space is less of an option. The NextScale system with water-cooled technology (it is literally called WCT by Lenovo) is the culmination of that engineering effort.

The NextScale systems were launched in September 2013 and pack a dozen single-width server nodes in a 6U enclosure. Unlike blade servers, the NextScale machines do not include all of the bells and whistles and redundant features that enterprise customers expect. With HPC and hyperscale customers alike, customers do not want any unnecessary feature in the box, which costs money and adds complexity to the system and therefore increases the odds that the system will break. The water-cooled NextScale machine is based on the single-wide nodes, and as Scott Tease, executive director of high performance computing at Lenovo explains to HPCwire, they include a dripless quick-connect system that runs warm water through water blocks to cool both the Xeon processors and their main memory.

lenovo-nextscale-wct

IBM has been putting water blocks on processors and main memory for years, so this is nothing new. But the way that the memory is cooled a bit different from the way IBM had done it. The main memory modules in the system are spaced apart a little and a water pipe is run between them. A heat-conducting piece of metal is pushed between a pair of memory modules to suck the heat out and transfer to the water pipe. A plastic cover is placed over the memory stick pair to ensure that no air gets in to absorb the heat. While the picture above shows a bezel with holes in it in the front of the server, in the production NextScale WCT systems this front is blocked off to prevent air from coming into the system; there is a set of baffles in the back of the server that do the same as they wrap around the water intake and output pipes.

By removing the fans and water cooling the processors and main memory in the two-socket NextScale node, Lenovo has a bit of extra headroom to boost the performance of the system. And so Lenovo has done the cool thing all the server kiddies are doing these days, and that is go to Intel to get a custom variant of the new Haswell Xeon E5 processor, the family of which was announced in early September. Lenovo has a version of the chip called the E5-2698A v3, which is a 16-core chip that runs at 2.8 GHz and that can have a sustained Turbo Boost speed of 3.2 GHz. This overclocking is made possible, Tease explains to HPCwire, because the efficiency of the water-cooling leaves about 6 percent thermal headroom over air-cooled versions of the chip that run at a lower 2.3 GHz clock speed normally. After the removal of fans (which consume power) and water-blocking on the memory, the overall reduction in system power is with the NextScale WCT is even higher than 6 percent, and with the water-blocking most datacenters using this system in most regions of the world can be cooled without the need of water chillers. Demonstrating the exponential relationship between clock speed and heat, cutting the thermals on the chip by 6 percent allows a 500 MHz increase in core clock speed, with another 400 MHz on top of that with Turbo Boost pushed up and held steady.

The NextScale WCT node has eight memory slots per socket, which is more than enough for most HPC applications. With Turbo Boost jacked up on a sustained basis, the NextScale WCT node with two of the Xeon E5-2698A v3 processors has a peak theoretical performance of 1.083 teraflops doing double-precision floating point math, which is about the same performance as Intel’s current “Knights Corner” Xeon Phi coprocessor card. That works out to about 2.45 gigaflops per watt, says Tease, which is on-par with the energy efficiency of many hybrid CPU-accelerator systems. That works out to 181.9 teraflops in a standard 42U rack.

Add up the savings that come from outside air cooling, and the NextScale WCT setup can cut the energy bill by as much as 40 percent, says Tease. That means either lowering the electric bill or being able to allocate that much more electricity to a more powerful system in the same energy budget. The NextScale WCT accepts water coming in at 45 degrees Celsius, which is about 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Waste heat comes out of the rack through water that is around 55 degrees, which is about 131 degrees and plenty useful.

But Lenovo is not stopping there. The NextScale WCT will be equipped with Intel’s forthcoming “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi coprocessor, which will have a peak theoretical performance in excess of 3 teraflops per chip. Intel is making the Knights Landing chip available in its own socket, and Lenovo plans to put two of them in the NextScale WCT nodes, that will deliver at least 500 teraflops per rack. That means Lenovo could cram a petaflops of performance in two server racks. Tease was quick to point out that the “Roadrunner” system built by IBM for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for around $100 million was the first system to break the petaflops barrier and needed 296 racks and 3 megawatts of power to do so.

We have come a long way in terms of compressing this level of performance into smaller spaces and power envelopes, and next year will be a big year for hybrid computing to push the barriers even further.

Lenovo will be installing a NextScale WCT system at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Munich, Germany, and it will be Phase 2 of the SuperMUC system.

lenovo-innovation-centerSeparately, Lenovo will be working with LRZ and a number of other key players to start an innovation center in Stuttgart, Germany. It will be installing an air-cooled NextScale cluster with 5,000 cores to start. The system will use 100 Gb/sec EDR InfiniBand networks from Mellanox Technologies to hook the nodes together, and it will eventually be expanded with the water-cooling options next year. This air-cooled system will be the focal point of HPC research in Europe for Lenovo, and the system will be up and running by January with the water-cooled upgrade and the addition of Xeon Phi coprocessors coming later in 2015.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from its predecessors, including the red-hot H100 and A100 GPUs. Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. While Nvidia may not spring to mind when thinking of the quant Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet the HPE Mentors

March 18, 2024

The latest installment of the 2024 Winter Classic Studio Update Show features our interview with the HPE mentor team who introduced our student teams to the joys (and potential sorrows) of the HPL (LINPACK) and accompany Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the field was normalized for boys in 1969 when the Apollo 11 missi Read more…

Apple Buys DarwinAI Deepening its AI Push According to Report

March 14, 2024

Apple has purchased Canadian AI startup DarwinAI according to a Bloomberg report today. Apparently the deal was done early this year but still hasn’t been publicly announced according to the report. Apple is preparing Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimization algorithms to iteratively refine their parameters until Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimizat Read more…

PASQAL Issues Roadmap to 10,000 Qubits in 2026 and Fault Tolerance in 2028

March 13, 2024

Paris-based PASQAL, a developer of neutral atom-based quantum computers, yesterday issued a roadmap for delivering systems with 10,000 physical qubits in 2026 a Read more…

India Is an AI Powerhouse Waiting to Happen, but Challenges Await

March 12, 2024

The Indian government is pushing full speed ahead to make the country an attractive technology base, especially in the hot fields of AI and semiconductors, but Read more…

Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office

March 12, 2024

(March 1, 2024) My first official day at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was June 15, 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 loc Read more…

AI Bias In the Spotlight On International Women’s Day

March 11, 2024

What impact does AI bias have on women and girls? What can people do to increase female participation in the AI field? These are some of the questions the tech Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Analyst Panel Says Take the Quantum Computing Plunge Now…

November 27, 2023

Should you start exploring quantum computing? Yes, said a panel of analysts convened at Tabor Communications HPC and AI on Wall Street conference earlier this y Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins

November 13, 2023

A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers. Argonne N Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire