Lenovo Unveils Hybrid GenAI Solutions in Collaboration with NVIDIA

March 18, 2024 – At NVIDIA GTC, a global AI conference, Lenovo announced new hybrid AI solutions, built in collaboration with NVIDIA, designed to deliver the power of tailored generative AI applications to enterprises and cloud.

Stemming from the expanded engineering collaboration announced with NVIDIA during Lenovo Tech World, the innovations help enterprises and cloud providers with the critical accelerated computing capabilities needed to succeed in the AI era, taking AI from concept to reality and empowering businesses to efficiently develop and deploy new AI use cases that drive innovation, digitalization and growth.

The hybrid solutions are purpose built through engineering collaboration to efficiently bring AI to customer data, where and when users need it the most – from the pocket to the cloud – advancing Lenovo’s vision to enable AI for all and delivering time to market support of breakthrough architecture for the next generation of massive scale generative AI. Lenovo hybrid solutions, already optimized to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for secure, supported and stable production AI, will now also provide developers access to the justannounced NVIDIA microservices, including NVIDIA NIM and NeMo Retriever.

“Lenovo’s work with NVIDIA is pushing the boundaries of augmented intelligence for businesses everywhere, taking AI compute to where their data lives with a comprehensive portfolio of cutting-edge, hybrid AI solutions that will power generative AI from virtually anywhere while supporting sustainability efforts,” said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. “We are at an inflection point where new AI use cases are coming to market based on improvements in real-time computing, power efficiency and ease of deployment. Through our partnership with NVIDIA, we are delivering groundbreaking advancements in efficiency, performance, and cost that are accelerating AI applications across every industry and helping businesses immediately use insights from their data sets, whether for upgrading the retail experience, reimagining our cities, or unlocking the next level of smart manufacturing.”

“AI is a powerful force helping businesses unlock new insights from their data and enhance productivity,” said Bob Pette, Vice President of Enterprise Platforms at NVIDIA. “Lenovo’s new enterprise AI solutions, integrated with NVIDIA technology, demonstrate a pivotal milestone in supercharging compute performance for AI, delivering hybrid systems that businesses can rely on to power generative AI from virtually anywhere.”

As industries around the globe seek to use AI for analyzing vast bodies of data, power efficiency remains crucial to making the rollout of these compute-intensive workloads accessible for all businesses. Lenovo has been at the forefront of enabling efficient, high-power computing without compromise, pioneering Lenovo Neptune liquid cooling technology and ranking  #1 on the Green500 list for cutting-edge designs powered by NVIDIA GPUs that accelerate computing capabilities while keeping things cool even in high-heat, multi-GPU environments.

Marking a game-changing milestone in efficiently supercharging AI-workloads at scale, Lenovo unveiled the expansion of the Lenovo ThinkSystem AI portfolio, featuring two new powerful 8-way NVIDIA GPU systems that are purpose-built to deliver massive computational capabilities with uncompromised power efficiency to accelerate AI implementation. Engineered for generative AI, natural language processing (NLP), and large language model (LLM) development, with time-to-market support for the NVIDIA HGX AI supercomputing platform, including NVIDIA H100 and H200 Tensor Core GPUs and the all-new NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GB200 Superchip, as well as the advanced, next-generation NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and Spectrum-X800 Ethernet networking platforms.

Lenovo ThinkSystem AI servers with NVIDIA B200 Tensor Core GPUs are set to power the new era of generative AI. The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture’s generative AI Engine, alongside the faster NVIDIA NVLink interconnect and enhanced security capabilities, propel the data center into a new era. With up to 25X more real-time inference to accelerate trillion-parameter language models, B200 GPUs are designed for the most demanding AI, data analytics and HPC workloads.

With an ultra-efficient power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1., the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 is a 5U system that uses Lenovo Neptune™ liquid cooling. By using direct water cooling of CPU and GPUs and NVIDIA NVSwitch technology, the system can sustain maximum performance without hitting any thermal limits. For more than a decade, Lenovo’s industry-leading Lenovo Neptune direct water-cooling solution, which recycles loops of warm water to cool data center systems, enabling customers to realize up to a 40% reduction in power consumption and a 3.5x improvement in thermal efficiencies compared to traditional air-cooled systems. As an industry metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center, PUE and power consumption are among the top-tracked sustainability methods, according to the “Uptime Institute Annual Global Data Center Survey 2021.” Because liquid cooling provides a more energy-efficient alternative to air, the system can drive higher sustained performance while consuming less energy. It also allows the ThinkSystem SR780a to fit in a dense 5U package, helping to conserve valuable data center real estate.

Also accelerating the portfolio, the new Lenovo ThinkSystem SR680a V3 is an air-cooled, two-socket system built for maximum acceleration for complex AI with Intel processors and a choice of NVIDIA GPUs. The highly accelerated systems deliver massive computational capability and use industry-standard 19-inch server racks, allowing for dense hardware configurations that maximize efficiency without occupying excessive floor space or requiring shelving.

Lenovo also showcased a new Lenovo PG8A0N – the ultimate 1U node for AI and featuring open-loop liquid cooling for accelerators, supporting the NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip. The new GB200 arrives to power a new era of computing. The superchip delivers 45X faster real-time large language model (LLM) inference, 40X lower TCO, and 40X less energy. In close collaboration with NVIDIA, Lenovo will deliver GB200 rack systems that supercharge AI training, data processing, engineering design and simulation.

Customers can run NVIDIA AI Enterprise, an end-to-end cloud-native software platform for the development and deployment of production-grade AI applications, on Lenovo’s portfolio of NVIDIA-Certified Systems. For high-performance inference on popular AI models from NVIDIA and its ecosystem, customers can run the NVIDIA NIM inference microservices included in NVIDIA AI Enterprise on Lenovo enterprise infrastructure.

The portfolio includes Lenovo’s XClarity Systems Management, giving businesses a simplified and centralized resource management system, as well as Lenovo’s Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO), a unified platform that streamlines use of clustered computing resources for AI model development and training and HPC workloads. The portfolio also supports the 4th and 5th generation of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and provides thermal headroom for future higher-power GPUs.

Lenovo is the leading provider of workstation-to-cloud support for designing, engineering and powering NVIDIA OVX systems and the NVIDIA Omniverse development platform. To help companies quickly build and deploy a wide range of purpose-built AI, HPC and Omniverse applications, Lenovo is partnering with NVIDIA to build accelerated models faster using NVIDIA MGX modular reference designs. Leveraging the designs, cloud service providers receive customized models faster with the delivery of accelerated computing for AI and Omniverse workloads economically and at scale. Including time-to-market support for the NVIDIA H200 GPU, the systems will enable scientists and researchers to tackle the world’s most challenging problems by accelerating complex AI and HPC applications running terabytes of data.

Lenovo’s new offerings built with the NVIDIA MGX modular reference server design include:

  • New Lenovo HG630N – MGX 1U – an open-standard server with Lenovo Neptune direct liquid cooling to reduce power consumption while supporting the highest-performing GPUs.
  • New Lenovo HG650N – MGX 2U – a highly modular, GPU-optimized system that is air-cooled, supports industry-standard racks and enables NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip
  • New Lenovo HG660X V3 – MGX 4U – a system that supports up to 8 600W NVIDIA GPUs in an air-cooled environment, ideal for NVIDIA Omniverse and AI workloads. Lenovo is a NVIDIA design partner for MGX 4U.
  • New Lenovo HR650N – MGX 2U – a high-performing Arm CPU server with multiple cores and flexibility for storage and Front IO, leveraging the energy-efficient NVIDIAGrace CPU Superchip and supporting DPUs.

Lenovo enhances its data science workstations by offering up to 4x NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs for large AI training, fine-tuning, inferencing, and accelerated graphics-intensive workloads. This offers greater AI developer productivity through automated workflows:

  • New Lenovo Workstations with NVIDIA AI Workbench is a software tool that enables the development and deployment of powerful AI solutions for inferencing, large-scale simulation, and demanding industrial and scientific workflows. NVIDIA AI Workbench makes generative AI and machine learning development easy for all developers.
  • Now available in Lenovo ThinkStation and ThinkPad workstations, the new NVIDIA A800 GPU designed specifically for AI enables secure, personal data science and Gen AI environments for organizations working with all kinds of AI Workflows.

Lenovo ThinkStation PX with dual CPUs and up to 4x NVIDIA RTX professional graphics cards is the most powerful workstation on the market today. Lenovo’s AI-ready ThinkStation desktop and ThinkPad mobile workstation portfolio offers the broadest and most powerful workstations for AI to tackle the most intensive real-time AI solution development. ​Learn more about Lenovo workstations and AI workflows today.

Lenovo’s real-time solutions powered by NVIDIA are using AI and Lenovo infrastructure to help customers accelerate smarter futures and realize new potential across industries. In retail, these solutions are analyzing customer movement and behavior to improve traffic flow and better manage inventory in real time.  In manufacturing, integrated Lenovo and NVIDIA solutions help improve safety between workers and machines by refining assembly line inspection processes. Across cities, integrated Lenovo edge AI solutions are helping city planners to get the most out of data by optimizing space, infrastructure and asset utilization to help manage people in traffic flows and reduce power consumption.

Lenovo’s newly announced AI Services Center Of Excellence (COE) combines business advisors, data scientists, and AI-optimized infrastructure as-a-service to maximize outcomes, meeting customers where they are on their AI journey. Following Lenovo’s proven AI-readiness methodology covering security, people, process, and technology, the AI COE offers the expertise and capabilities to enable businesses to fast-track their journey to implementing powerful, responsible, and sustainable AI.  Lenovo’s new AI professional services offerings include:

  • New AI Discover – Helps customers uncover the “art of the possible” for AI.  By conducting interactive workshops and assessments, looking across the entire ecosystem, and mapping out the AI strategy, Lenovo builds the blueprint for AI success.
  • New Fast Start Generative AI services with NVIDIA – Leverages powerful data insights and achieves a competitive advantage with Generative AI. Lenovo offers full-stack solutions to support the complete product lifecycle, plus services to implement, adopt, and scale Generative AI solutions.
  • New TruScale GenAI As-A-Service – Provides AI capabilities through an as a service model which increases flexibility, scalability and predictability.  With Lenovo TruScale, infrastructure is always right sized to procure, deploy and manage AI Innovation.
  • Enhanced Professional Services for AI – Helps customers accelerate their AI transformation by providing business advisors, data scientists, and AI-optimized infrastructure-as-a-service, ensuring a seamless utilization of sustainable AI.

See new products, technologies, and initiatives shaping the future of AI at NVIDIA GTC, running March 18-21 at the San Jose Convention Center and online here. For more information on how Lenovo is working with NVIDIA toward a smarter, faster future, visit https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/servers-storage/alliance/nvidia/.