X
Innovation

Intel-Lenovo to launch exascale council with NCI as a founding member

Members of a new council, called Project Everyscale, want to see exascale technology broadly adopted.
Written by Aimee Chanthadavong, Contributor

Lenovo and Intel, together with members of the global high-performance computing (HPC) community, including Australia's National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), have established an exascale visionary council, named Project Everyscale, that will dedicate its time to drive the broad adoption of exascale technology for organisations of all sizes.  

According to Lenovo, the council, which is slated to kick-off its work in early 2020, will focus on all aspects of the design of HPC systems from alternative cooling technologies to efficiency, density, racks, and storage, among others.

Other founding members of the council include Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC) unit; the Simon Foundation's Flatiron Institute; Germany's Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; Rutgers University; Texas A&M University; China's Tsinghua University; the United Kingdom's University of Birmingham; University of Chicago's Research Computing Center; and Canada's University of Toronto's SciNet supercomputing centre.

In addition, Lenovo announced that it worked with Intel to refresh Harvard University's FASRC large-scale computing cluster, Odyssey, to enable research in earthquake forecasting, as well as predictions on the spread of disease and star formation.

See also: Photos: The world's 25 fastest supercomputers (TechRepublic)

As part of the refresh, Lenovo and Intel developed a new HPC cluster, dubbed Cannon, using Lenovo's Neptune liquid cooling technology and 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 processors, consisting of 24 cores per socket and 48 cores per node. It also features 670 Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 NeXtScale servers.

The company touted that Cannon, for instance, can perform jobs such as geophysics models of the earth three to four times faster than the previous system.

Intel and Lenovo worked on a similar project with the Flatiron Institute that saw large-scale computing clusters being built to help the institute expand its research into biological sciences, astrophysics, quantum physics, and computational mathematics.

These announcements mark the ongoing partnership between Intel and Lenovo in the data centre. The two companies have committed to a multi-year plan cultivate the convergence of HPC and AI solutions. 

Related Coverage

Editorial standards