The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), a UK government agency that conducts research in science and engineering, has partnered with Lenovo to install a new supercomputer at the STFC Hartree Centre.
This new supercomputer, ten times more powerful than its predecessor, will use less electricity due to Lenovo’s direct water cooling technology. It will be utilized for AI research to benefit UK industry.
Part of the Hartree Centre’s £210 million Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) program, the new supercomputer will support the center’s supercomputing and AI activities. It will be housed at the new £30 million supercomputing center currently under construction.
A leap in supercomputing processing power
The Lenovo ThinkSystem Neptune, a 44.7 petaflop system, will perform over 44 quadrillion floating point operations per second. This GPU-based system is ideal for AI workloads and offers ten times the processing power of the current system, Scafell Pike, while being more energy-efficient.
The new supercomputer uses warm water cooling to reduce energy consumption by up to 40% and increase performance by up to 10%.
Powering UK Industry with AI
Situated at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory in the Liverpool City Region, the Hartree Centre is the UK’s only supercomputing center dedicated to industry engagement. It plays a crucial role in providing businesses with the skills and technical knowledge to adopt digital technologies such as supercomputing, quantum computing, and AI.
Solving global challenges
The new supercomputer at the HNCDI will contribute to industrial research in areas like weather modeling, energy initiatives, drug discovery, and more. It will support collaborations with organizations like the UK Atomic Energy Authority for research on clean nuclear fusion energy.
Kate Royse, director of STFC Hartree Centre, expressed excitement about the collaboration with Lenovo, aiming to equip UK industry with the necessary tools for digital technology adoption. Noam Rosen, EMEA director HPC/AI at Lenovo, emphasized the importance of building a powerful system tailored to meet diverse needs, while Mark Thomson, Executive Chair of STFC, highlighted the impact on UK businesses and the digital economy.
The HNCDI new Lenovo supercomputer in numbers:
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- The ThinkSystem Neptune can perform the same number of calculations as 20,790 top-of-the-range smartphones
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- An hour of calculation on a leading smartphone would take 0.17 seconds
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- It can hold 4500 hours of 4k video in its working memory
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- It can store 60,000 hours of 4k video in its hard disks
