Lenovo Data Center Group has recently announced that it would develop a supercomputer for SURF, which would be Netherland’s most powerful supercomputer. This is a €20 million ($24.2 million) project that will deliver a whopping 14 petaflops performance.
Lenovo ThinkSystem servers will be powered by the high-performing new AMD EPYC processors, Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs, and Nvidia Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking. It will be located in the Amsterdam Data Tower at the Amsterdam Science Park.
If you are unaware of what SURF is, it is actually a cooperative of universities, vocational schools, research institutions, and university medical centres that work together on ICT facilities and ICT innovations.
“The need of researchers for computing power, data storage, and processing is growing exponentially. In the design of the new supercomputer, the usability for scientific research was paramount,” said Walter Lioen, Research Services Manager at SURF. “SURF has chosen Lenovo because of its quality, performance and future flexibility, as well as its considerations for sustainability.”
SURF’s current Cartesius supercomputer with getting a major upgrade which previously delivered 1.3 petaflops of horsepower. This high-performance supercomputer will be used by 100 education and research institutions throughout the country.
It will help to perform calculations on various fields of science including meteorology, astrophysics, medical and social sciences, and materials and earth sciences including climate change research. SURF chose Lenovo over other OEMs due to its superior proposal in the field of performance and sustainability.
“Our partnership with SURF shows our continued commitment to delivering innovative HPC technology to empower those who help solve humanity’s greatest challenges,” said Noam Rosen, EMEA director, HPC & AI at Lenovo DCG. “Harnessing the capabilities of the dawning exascale era of computing and putting them in the hands of organizations like SURF for groundbreaking research is what Lenovo’s ‘From Exascale to Everyscale’ initiative is all about.”
Lenovo’s Neptune water-cooling technology will be able to remove approximately 90% of the heat from the system. The cost of this entire project will be borne by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, providing €18 million ($21.7 million), while SURF providing the rest.
