STUTTGART, Germany, March 25 — Lenovo has today announced the opening of the company’s first global High Performance Computing (HPC) innovation centre, offering a permanent R&D and application benchmarking site as well as a new ecosystem of partners that will collaborate on projects to bring the commercial benefits of HPC to a broader spectrum of clients and workloads.  Located in Stuttgart, Germany, the centre marks Lenovo’s commitment to enterprise computing and ambitions to become the number one Open Systems vendor in the market.

Coinciding with the opening, Lenovo has also been accepted as a full member of the European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC) – an industry-led forum that leverages the transformative power of HPC to boost European competiveness in science, business and industry.

Working closely with Intel, the centre offers the latest Intel Xeon E5 2600 v3 processor with Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect fabric leveraging Lenovo’s dense NeXtScale System as base compute platform.  It will leverage the deep knowledge and specific skills of several specialised client partners from across Europe that will collaborate to further expand capabilities and advance localised research.

Commenting on the announcement Lenovo EMEA President and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group, Aymar de Lencquesaing, said, “Today marks a milestone in our ambition as a company.  Not only are we opening the company’s first global HPC centre but we are reaffirming our commitment, investment and ambitions in the enterprise. The EMEA market has huge potential for HPC and provides a fertile ground for us to lead major advancements in projects and research that have an incredible impact on both industry and society.”

“This is a new approach to innovation – one that will harness the power of Lenovo, as well as that of our vendor and client partners to advance the benefits of HPC to more clients around the world,” said Brian Connors, Vice President Strategic Alliances and General Manager High Performance Computing Lenovo Worldwide.

Alongside the six visionary client partners and four industry leaders announced at SC14, three new Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and one new visionary client partner are joining the centre and collaboration.  Lenovo will continue to recruit and expand the ecosystem of partners beyond the following:

• Industry partners – Intel, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA
• Client partners – Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ), Science & Technology Facilities Council: Hartree Centre, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Cineca, Rechenzentrum Garching (RZG), Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing (DiRAC)
• ISV partners – ScaleMP, Allinea, PathScale

A number of key projects are already underway, including:

• Lenovo and Intel – MPI scaling on new technologies like OmniPath and EDR interconnects
• Lenovo and LRZ- Energy aware scheduling, energy efficient data centers and workload optimisation
• Lenovo and STFC Hartree Centre – Developing next generation supercomputing architectures and software, combining best practice with innovation to deliver energy efficient solutions
• Lenovo and Mellanox – MPI Scaling on EDR Fabric

“Intel is excited with the deep technical collaboration with Lenovo in their new HPC Innovation Center,” said Rajeeb Hazra, Vice President, Data Center Group and General Manager, Technical Computing Group at Intel. “In addition to giving end users early access to some of Intel’s latest technology, such as future Intel Xeon Phi processors and Intel Omni-Path Fabric, the Center will be a key software enabling site focusing on MPI tuning and code modernization for highly parallel applications.  We look forward to the important end user innovations that this Center will help to enable.”

“ScaleMP is proud to partner with Lenovo at the new Global HPC Innovation Center in Stuttgart, Germany, focusing on solutions for HPC and in-memory VLDBs.  Using ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation  products, Lenovo enables researchers and engineers to solve bigger problems, while decreasing complexity of deployments, and enables enterprise users to easily fit huge databases into RAM for unmatched performance and cost savings,” stated Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP. “We continually strive to remove the boundaries and constraints imposed by legacy scale-up server architectures through scalable software and tight partnerships, and are enthusiastic about the intensified collaboration with Lenovo.”

“Lenovo’s HPC innovation center at Stuttgart will provide developers and users with access to Mellanox EDR 100G InfiniBand Interconnect solutions for optimizing application performance to take advantage of the most efficient high-performance interconnect,” said Gilad shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Interconnect performance capabilities are critical to data- and compute-intensive applications which require ultra-low latency and a high rate of message communication in order to deliver faster results.”

One such project utilising the Innovation Centre backbone is being done in the UK where Lenovo technologists are working with the STFC DiRAC Facility scientists to explore new methods in dealing with very large scale memory intensive applications. Dr. Jeremy Yates, Director of the DiRAC Facility says, “One of the key success factors of the Innovation Centre will be measured by how it helps to promote regional intellectual property and we are encouraged by the focus on satellite collaborations.”

About Lenovo

Lenovo is a $39 billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technology. Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers PCs (including the legendary Think and multimode YOGA brands), workstations, servers, storage, smart TVs and a family of mobile products like smartphones (including the Motorola brand), tablets and apps.

—

Source: Lenovo