SuperComputing22 has wrapped up, and the HPC community returned live and in-person! Judging from the foot traffic we saw at the Lenovo booth, it almost looked to be pre-pandemic level. Perhaps it was the fact that after two years, everybody had run low on tradeshow tchotchkes for the kids, or stylish lanyards to impress the co-workers, that attracted the crowd to Dallas. Maybe it was to see the latest systems based on newly announced CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. Whatever the reason, the HPC community returned to SC and things looked a lot like “normal” again.
Lenovo had plenty to celebrate and we couldn’t think of a better place to do it than SC22. The big news was that our customer Flatiron Institute was able to take the #1 position on the Green500 with their Henri system, which is built on Lenovo’s GPU-rich ThinkSystem SR670 V2. We also maintained our position as the #1 provider of systems on the TOP500 and were especially proud that we have expanded our TOP500 footprint to 19 different markets across the globe. Lenovo also had a couple of anniversaries to celebrate: The 30th for ThinkSystem and ThinkPad, and the 10th for Neptune™ direct water-cooled systems.
To celebrate Neptune™’s first decade we showcased our newest models featuring 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors and Intel’s newest Xeon® CPU Max Series. We also showed new Neptune™ GPU systems based on NVIDIA’s H100 Tensor Core GPU and Intel’s Data Center GPU Max Series. These were all displayed on our “Wall of Neptune™” which showed the evolution of our water-cooled systems since our first systems from a decade ago.
Solutions in storage, networking and our integrated software stack featuring Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) were popular. Two areas that really drew interest were our live demo of OVX with NVIDIA, and our ThinkStation™ workstations that were driving a virtual Aston-Martin VR demo. Many folks stopped at our ped dedicated to our services and TruScale HPC as a Service offerings. We’ve entered the Exascale era, and Lenovo is dedicated to making Exascale technologies available to customer of any size, or what we call “From Exascale to Everyscale™. You can check out the entire booth spread on this video featuring a guy with a face for printed media.
Most importantly, after a two-year hiatus, (SC21 did not count, sorry St. Louis), we once again got to interact with members of the HPC community and talk face-to-face about the things that matter most to them. Acceleration was a key topic, along with higher speed interconnect, and high bandwidth memory, as you’d expect. But we also had in-depth discussions about acquisition flexibility, sustainability, and carbon footprints, escalating power envelopes and alternatives to air cooling. We also talked about what the future holds for specific workloads in areas as diverse as weather, seismic, and bioinformatics.
No matter with whom we spoke, almost unanimous was the opinion that after COVID, high performance, research computing is more vital than ever, and solving humanity’s greatest challenges starts with this community.