NEW ORLEANS, La., Nov. 18 — At Supercomputing 2014 (SC14), Lenovo today announced several new initiatives featuring the latest advancements in high-performance computing (HPC), that bring the commercial benefits of HPC to a broader spectrum of clients and workloads.

“HPC is fueling major advancements in areas with high impact to both industry and humanity,” said Adalio Sanchez, senior vice president, Enterprise Systems Group. “These span the discovery of the world’s new energy reserves to biomedical research improving global healthcare. To take advantage of this opportunity, clients seek an IT partner with extensive skills and experience in designing solutions that can meet their unique needs. Our Lenovo team has a long heritage of industry expertise in HPC leading-edge technology. We are investing in innovation, both in research and development, and in services and support to help clients capitalize on emerging trends in HPC – including cloud and big data analytics.”

The announcements today include a state-of-the-art innovation center and a record-setting benchmark.

Lenovo HPC Innovation Center in Stuttgart, Germany

This new center will establish a permanent benchmarking and R&D site for Lenovo, and will offer a broad ecosystem of technologies and skills to help clients optimize their applications. With support from key partners including Intel and Mellanox, Lenovo is creating a state-of-the-art system, the foundation of the innovation center, powered by the new Intel Xeon E5 2600 v3 + Xeon Phi coprocessors and leveraging new Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect fabric. While the core facility will reside in Stuttgart, the Lenovo HPC Innovation Center will call on the talents of several specialized client partners from across Europe that will operate satellite sites to further expand capabilities and advance localized research. Lenovo will leverage the newest technology, cooperation with client partners and expansive HPC skills to advance the science and broaden the adoption of high-performance computing. The installation of the Stuttgart center will begin in December and will be online for client use in January 2015. Collaboration with key client partners is already underway.

The world’s highest-performing, two-socket server with the Intel Xeon E5 2698A v3 processor

Lenovo and Intel collaborated to create the Intel Xeon E5-2698A v3, a CPU optimized for HPC workloads and available only in specially designed servers such as the NeXtScale System with Water Cool Technology (WCT). The Intel E5-2698A v3, when installed in the NeXtScale with WTC, is the industry’s highest-performing, two-socket server platform1, effectively breaking the single-node one teraflop barrier (1.083 teraflops) without the need for accelerators. The unique processor features 16 cores running at up to 3.2GHz with turbo mode enabled. In addition to record-setting performance, NeXtScale with WCT allows clients to create a green data center that achieves the ultimate combination of energy efficiency and performance while helping to lower total cost of ownership. Owing to the extreme efficiency of the water-cooled thermal design, processors running in the NeXtScale with WCT can reduce power consumption at a processor level by six percent and at a data-center level by more than 40 percent, as most installations can run without the need for costly chilled-water systems.

A futuristic petaflop demonstration

Lenovo’s ”peta cube” demonstration showcases how one petaflop of performance — initially supported by nearly 6,000 square feet with 296 racks weighing upwards of half a million pounds — will soon be available within a condensed 42U tall, four foot- by-four foot space comprised of two standard racks. This unique engineering leverages NeXtScale System with WCT and Intel Knights Landing technology to deliver huge computing capacity in only two racks of space. The capability will allow Lenovo to provide petaflop compute capacity to mainstream clients that might currently lack the operating budget and data-center capacity to support a petaflop system.

Those attending SC14 this week can learn more by visiting Lenovo at booth #1749.

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.

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Source: Lenovo