Lenovo Selected for New Supercomputer at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing

Lenovo announces the contract signing for the joint construction of a new High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster with the University of Paderborn.  The integration of the new system will be carried out by the HPC partner pro-com DATENSYSTEME. The installation is scheduled to take place in the second half of the year and is expected to have a runtime of at least 5 years. From 2025, a significant portion of the computing system will be made available for nationwide research as part of the National High-Performance Computing (NHR), supporting, among other things, the research focus on “Atomic Simulation.”

The HPC system is also intended to be accessible to all researchers at the University of Paderborn and other scientists in the NRW research focus. This new HPC system, with approximately double the computing power, will complement the current Noctua 2 supercomputer at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2).

The system will include the ThinkSystem SD665 V3 server with the next AMD processor technology for the CPU partition. For the GPU nodes, the ThinkSystem SD665-N V3 server is planned, which, in addition to AMD CPUs, features four NVIDIA H100 GPUs. The total number of cores amounts to more than 136,000.

A particular focus is on improving energy efficiency. To achieve a cooling solution tailored to PC2, the Coolmanager from the German company Waning will be employed, which can be optimized according to the specific requirements. Lenovo itself incorporates innovative technologies, including the Neptune warm water cooling. With the use of warm water-cooled power supplies and fully insulated racks, over 97% of the generated heat can be directly transferred to the warm water circulation instead of the data center. Additionally, this allows operating the processors more efficiently by using higher water temperatures for performance enhancement. Through heat exchangers and CDUs (Coolant Distribution Units), return temperatures of over 45 degrees Celsius are achieved, enabling complete free cooling and waste heat reuse.

Another innovation is the partial use of Open-Loop technology in Lenovo’s system, a feature not found in any other system in Germany. This allows connecting CPUs from the 1U and 2U standard servers to water cooling. In addition to the improved energy efficiency of the overall system, this also enables the use of high-performance processors in combination with FPGA accelerators. This server cooling is also used in the FPGA partition of the HPC system.

As a storage system, a solution based on the IBM ESS 3500 is intended to provide flexible use of NVMe and HDD storage.