Lenovo delivers new high-performance computer for the Max Planck Society

The project sees Lenovo provide future high-performance computing resources for one of the most successful and renowned research institutions not only in Germany, but the world. In addition to supplying the cooling infrastructure, hardware and software, the €20 million project also includes operational support and comprehensive services from Lenovo.

Lenovo's contribution to science and research

Featuring Lenovo's Neptune™ state-of-the-art liquid-cooling technology, the supercomputer will provide computing power across various Max Planck Institutes, thus making a substantial contribution to science and research.

The new system is intended to significantly increase the existing computing capacity of the high-performance computing complex installed in 2018, with an aggregated peak performance of 12 PFlop/s.

Max Planck’s decision to work with Lenovo as their trusted data center partner was not only based on the performance of the hardware. The Lenovo offer was the winning solution because of the end to end capabilities and completeness of the package, which includes on-site support for operation and maintenance by Lenovo employees, as well as other services such as application support.

Commenting on the resource efficiency of the HPC cluster configured by Lenovo, is Dr. Hermann Lederer from the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF): "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."

Powerful and energy efficient through water cooling

With more than 100,000 cores and state-of-the-art GPUs, Lenovo's new system will not only support and accelerate cutting-edge research but is also highly energy efficient. Unlike its predecessor, Max-Planck's new HPC cluster is water-cooled in two stages. During the first stage, all essential components of the boards are directly cooled with liquid circulated copper piping. The second stage additionally cools the entire racks using the Lenovo Rear Door Heat Exchanger (water-cooled rear doors) in order to dissipate 100% of the so-called convection waste heat into the water. This cooling process reduces energy consumption considerably and allows the processors to work at their optimal operating point. Moreover, the two-stage cooling concept significantly increases the 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. In addition to the latest direct water-cooled servers from Lenovo's ThinkSystem series, the latest GPU products from Nvidia, the Tesla A100, are used. 

Installation has already started

After initial preparatory work in March, Lenovo has already begun installing the cooling infrastructure. The first subsystem is scheduled to go into operation as early as this summer. In early 2021, the system will be equipped with the latest Intel CPUs and a corresponding proportion of Nvidia A100 GPUs.

In addition to supplying the infrastructure and hardware, the Lenovo Data Center Group will also manage the maintenance of the cluster and provide services for the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility as part of the contract.

“I am very pleased that the Max Planck Society has chosen Lenovo and I have great confidence in our HPC expertise,” says 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.”