This week at SC14, The US supercomputing conference in New Orleans, Lenovo and Iceotope announced new products aimed at HPC workloads.
Lenovo announced the Intel Xeon E5-2698A v3, a CPU optimised for HPC workloads and available only in specially designed servers such as the NeXtScale System with Water Cool Technology (WCT). Iceotope have announced PetaGen, a best-in-breed liquid cooling system – a design for High Performance Computing (HPC) and suitable for supercomputing and data centre facilities.
Lenovo and Intel collaborated to create the Intel Xeon E5-2698A v3, a CPU optimised for HPC workloads. The Intel E5-2698A v3, when installed in the NeXtScale with WTC, effectively breaks the single-node one teraflop barrier (1.083 teraflops) without the need for accelators.
The unique processor features 16 cores running at up to 3.2GHz with turbo mode enabled. NeXtScale with WCT allows clients to create a green data centre that achieves the ultimate combination of energy efficiency and performance while helping to lower total cost of ownership.
The company claims that processors running in the NeXtScale with WCT can reduce power consumption at a processor level by six per cent and at a data-centre level by more than 40 per cent, as most installations can run without the need for costly chilled-water systems.
The Iceotope system, called PetaGen, is a full production Total Liquid Cooling solution that improves IT performance, energy efficiency and density, whilst reducing Total Cost of Ownership and data centre complexity.
PetaGen was developed in partnership with Intel to cool its latest processor chips, something which many other liquid cooling platforms have failed to do due to the considerable heat output of top-end IT components.
Short for ‘Peta-Generation’, PetaGen was named in reference to petascale computing, a term encompassing the current generation of the world’s fastest supercomputer systems.
PetaGen increases IT performance per watt through effectively cooling components and enabling the reliable and efficient use of turbo modes, further reducing energy usage and expenditure.
PetaGen is a fully contained and fully sealed liquid cooling system that immerses electronics in a sophisticated, non-conductive, engineered fluid. Without any spinning fans, PetaGen units are virtually silent in operation and can also be deployed in populated labs and offices.
Furthermore, PetaGen can, unlike many liquid-cooled systems can cool top-end processor chips. This enables Iceotope customers to take advantage of incredibly powerful computing resources - the kind needed to support the use of big data analytics and cloud computing.
‘Some of these top-end chips are, for a lack of a better word, “un-coolable” for other liquid cooling systems,’ said Peter Hopton, Iceotope founder and Chief Visionary Officer (CVO). ‘Given the excessive heat involved at the high end of computing, most liquid cooled systems can only handle mid-low density IT, the kind which simply isn’t suitable or used by the most advanced HPC or data centre facilities – we’re looking to put a stop to that with PetaGen.’
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