Lenovo N1380 Rack Chassis
[SPONSORED GUEST ARTICLE] Microprocessors have stolen the headlines among HPC (and HPC-AI) systems components, but today, in what some call the “Age of Computation*,” chips dominate more than ever. Among tech vendors, chip companies lead the way with advanced accelerators that make trillion-parameter LLMs come alive.
But the price paid for advanced processing is heat. Every system component that uses power produces heat (1W of power = 1W of heat), none more than chips. Without innovations in thermal control, high-end HPC-AI servers will collapse from heatstroke.
Lenovo (SC24 booth 2201), with its ThinkSystem servers and Neptune™ liquid cooling technology, has been a leader in helping customers stay ahead of the compute power-heat management curve for more than a decade. And now the company has come out with new innovations that combine an alternate system design with Neptune® warm water cooling advancements that deliver something new for the HPC-AI industry – while cutting data center power consumption by up to 40 percent.
Let’s look at the new chassis in Lenovo’s data center server line, the ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune® chassis, which reshapes water cooling and data center design with 100 percent heat removal.
The N1380 is a rack chassis, which means it is enclosed within a structure designed to be mounted in a server rack holding multiple servers.. Lenovo leveraged the N1380 chassis as the basis for the ThinkSystem SC777 V4, which represents an expansion in Lenovo’s collaboration with NVIDIA (the Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage with NVIDIA). This powerful new system brings NVIDIA’s flagship Blackwell and the NVIDIA GB200 processors to the enterprise, enabling trillion-parameter AI models in a compact design.
The ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune® features eight tray slots, four 15kW power conversion stations, with a sophisticated Neptune® water flow distribution providing full direct warm-water cooling up to 45° C, packaged for optimal space, power, and cooling efficiency.
With advanced Neptune® water cooling, the server allows components to operate at lower temperatures and effectively removes all heat from all components, including CPUs, GPUs, memory, I/O, local storage, and voltage regulators.
The first thing you notice about the N1380 is that the servers stand on their sides and are stacked vertically within a rack. Individual server trays slide into the chassis, and with Lenovo’s SmartGlide technology, the power, water, and management port all connect when the tray locks into place. Customers don’t have to use any tools or connect cables or cords. The N1380 enables customers to run 100KW+ server racks that are 100 percent liquid cooled, eliminating the need for specialized air conditioning. Organizations can now leverage the highest accelerated computing available one tray at a time using standard power in an open ecosystem.
“The new Neptune® looks very different,” said Scott Tease, Lenovo’s VP, ISG Product Group at last month at Lenovo’s annual Tech World conference, where the N1380 and SC777 V4 were introduced.
“It’s vertical, it looks like books,” he said. “The larger compute complexes for the next generation of silicon present a challenge for board design. There’s a limit to how tight you can pack things onto the board without getting heat issues.” This means if the server had a conventional horizontal design, it wouldn’t be compatible with conventional racks, customers would be unable to easily slot it into their data centers.
Lenovo ThinkSystem SC777 V4
So Lenovo pulled together a team to figure out a work-around. “We said, ‘Look, we’ve got to find a way to take these technologies but make them available for people that have standard racks,’” Tease said, “because that’s the majority of the world.”
“Customers don’t want to bring in a 3800 kilogram rack or a 2.5 meter-wide rack, or something that doesn’t fit through the door of a freight elevator,” Tease explained. “They don’t want to reinforce data center floors. They want it to fit it in what they’re used to using, with the power they’re used to delivering, the weights they’re used to supporting, and they want it to fit in the rack spacing that they’re used to.”
In effect, Lenovo has turned the supercomputing world on its edge.
“Instead of sliding the thing into a big, wide rack, we basically made the width tall,” Tease said, “and that’s the big thing that differentiates us from our competition. Making this advanced technology accessible for everybody, that’s our role.”
* Torsten Hoefler, Scientific Symposium – Introducing “Alps”
