October 15, 2024 – Lenovo unveiled the next phase of its AI vision at the company’s annual Tech World event held today near Seattle. Lenovo showcased a portfolio of AI solutions, services and servers designed, Lenovo said, to deliver “transformation and tangible” return on AI investments.
Relevant to the HPC community and to AI for science, Lenovo launched a new generation of Lenovo Neptune liquid coolingtechnology for servers and high perforamce clusters.
Lenovo called the 6th generation ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune a “vertical liquid cooling breakthrough” that supports accelerated computing while reducing data center power consumption by up to 40 percent, based on Lenovo internal testing. Lenovo, of course, has long been active in liquid cooling, including a supercomputer cluster installed at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich in 2012.
Lenovo also said it has expanded its collaboration with Nvidia with the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with Nvidia and unveiled the ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune server, which leverages the N1380 Neptune and is intended to bring Nvidia’s flagship Blackwell GPU platform, announced last March, and the Nvidia GB200, combining Blackwell with the Grace Arm-based CPU, to enable trillion-parameter AI models in a compact design, according to Lenovo.
As AI adoption increases, data centers operators have had to re-engineer their facilities for higher thermal densities. Lenovo said the new Neptune technology and the ThinkSystem SC777 V4 Neptune “is pioneering data centers in which 100KW+ server racks are running without specialized…air conditioning.”
“For more than a decade, Lenovo has pioneered liquid cooling innovations, with the goal of bringing the power of HPC to every organization,” said Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yuanqing Yang. “Through groundbreaking liquid-cooling engineering and technology integration, ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune is unlocking a new era of data center efficiency and design that will help bring NVIDIA Blackwell and trillion-parameter AI to all, while fundamentally changing how power is used in the data center.”
ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune technology uses a vertical, 100 percent liquid cooling chassis. Designed for industry standard 19-inch racks, Lenovo said organizations of any size “can leverage the highest accelerated computing available one tray at a time using standard power in an open ecosystem.”
“The Nvidia Blackwell platform is the engine to power generative AI and define a new industrial revolution,” said Bob Pette, Vice President of Enterprise Platforms at Nvidia. Lenovo and Nvidia are “supporting the world’s most technologically advanced accelerated workloads while massively reducing operation costs and energy consumption….,” Pette said.
The new Lenovo server supports the latest Nvidia Quantum-X800 InfiniBand and Spectrum-X800 Ethernet platforms for accelerated networking. In addition, the server supports Nvidia AI Enterprise, a cloud-native software platform for generative AI, computer vision and speech AI.
Lenovo’s will deliver Nvidia GB200 rack systems with open-loop, direct warm-water cooling for the entire Grace Blackwell system architecture with Nvidia NVLink interconnect. Lenovo said the ThinkSystem server effectively removes all heat from all components, including GPUs, memory, I/O, local storage, and voltage regulators in a quieter system.
The server scales from a 13U enclosure to full racks, rows, and data centers, features eight tray slots, four 15kW power conversion stations, with a Neptune water flow distribution. It includes up to four ThinkSystem 15kW Titanium Power Conversion Stations (PCS), supplying internal system power to a 48V busbar. This design merges power conversion, rectification, and distribution into a single PCS, a departure from traditional setups that demand separate units.
The server also includes an integrated manifold with a patented blind-mate mechanism and aerospace-grade dripless connectors to the compute trays, for safer operation. Lenovo also said Neptune is designed to operate at water inlet temperatures as low as the dew point allows, up to 45°C, which eliminates additional chilling and allows for efficient reuse of the generated heat for building heat or adsorption chilling cold water generation.
Lenovo said it has secured more than 40 liquid cooling patents and utilizes custom brazed copper water loops and patented CPU cold plates, along with stainless steel and EPDM hoses.
At today’s Lenovo Tech World ’24 event in Bellevue, WA, Lenovo Chairman and CEO Yang was joined by AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, Nvidia Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon.
“Building on the announcements from last year’s Tech World, we have been actively delivering on our hybrid-AI vision for customers and partners across the globe,” Yang said. “We already see that AI is improving the quality of life for individuals and delivering higher productivity for enterprises—and Lenovo makes this paradigm shift faster, more accessible, more connected, and more sustainable. Our strategy is to combine modularization with customization, so that we can respond quickly to customer needs while tailoring our solutions for them.”
Lenovo also unveiled proof of concepts with medical and social impacts.
Lenovo launched Alzheimer’s Intelligence, the first avatar companion for people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia, using a curated data set of real experiences to provide support to people facing a difficult diagnosis. Alzheimer’s Intelligence builds upon Lenovo’s Work For Humankind initiative.
Lenovo and InCor, the largest cardiac hospital in Latin America, announced a clinical-grade arrhythmia detection platform, which brings AI to a small, wearable IoT device for real-time monitoring.