Lenovo will provide the new supercomputer of network of the research organizations of Max Planck

2020: Delivery of the supercomputer

On July 13, 2020 the Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) company announced contract signature on delivery of the supercomputer for Society on assistance to science of Max Planck. The supercomputer will be installed in the city of Garkhing-bay-Munich. The Computer and information center of Society of Max Planck will manage it (Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, MPCDF). Deployment began in May, 2020, and full commissioning of all system is planned for the beginning of 2021.

Within the project of Lenovo provides high-performance computing resources. In addition to delivery of infrastructure of cooling, hardware and the software, the project worth 20 million euros also includes providing operational support and complex services of Lenovo.

The supercomputer equipped with technology of liquid cooling Lenovo Neptune will provide computing powers to different institutes of Society of Max Planck. A system will increase capacities of the complex of high-performance computing unrolled in 2018, having provided cumulative peak capacity at the level of 12 petaFLOPS.

Max Planck's society selected Lenovo as the partner in project implementation with DPC thanks to machine output, complex opportunities and completeness of a packet of the provided services. Among them — support and service by the staff of the company on site, services in support of applications, etc.

"We were interested in system performance combination to its energy efficiency and compactness, direct water cooling, low requirements to the occupied space and infrastructure and also service quality", 'Doctor Herman Lederer, MPCDF noted'

The system of Lenovo equipped more than 100,000 cores and modern graphic processors will be capable to support the advanced researches, having provided at the same time energy efficiency. Unlike the predecessor, the cluster of high-performance computing of Society of Max Planck is equipped with a two-level water cooling system. At the first stage principal components of payments are cooled directly using copper tubes with the circulating liquid. At the second stage of a rack are in addition cooled using the heat exchangers on the basis of water cooling installed in back doors (Lenovo Rear Door Heat Exchanger). They allow to take away 100% of so-called convective heat in liquid. Such process of cooling reduces energy consumption and allows processors to work in the optimal mode. Besides, the concept of two-level cooling increases the overall energy efficiency of the cooling system: heat does not dissipate in surrounding DPC air that, in turn, reduces the need for energy for its cooling. In addition to servers with direct water cooling of the Lenovo ThinkSystem series the graphic processors Tesla A100 from NVIDIA company are used.

Upon completion of initial preparatory work in March specialists of Lenovo already began deployment of infrastructure of cooling. Commissioning of the first subsystem is planned for summer of 2020. At the beginning of 2021 a system will be equipped processors Intel also with the graphic processors NVIDIA A100.

In addition to delivery of infrastructure and the equipment, Lenovo Data Center Group will also manage service of a cluster and to provide to Computer and information center of Society of Max Planck all necessary services within the contract.