Intel announced plans this week for the new HX2 supercomputer at Imperial College London built on Lenovo servers and powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors with Performance-cores (P-cores).
The water-cooled HX2 system, scheduled for deployment later this year, will be part of Imperial College London’s Research Computing Service.
Residing in a co-location data center in London, the new HX2 supercomputer was built with a focus on sustainability, Intel said. Based on Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SC750 V4 Neptune servers with Neptune direct liquid cooling technology.
Lenovo said its Neptune technology removes up to 98 percent of system heat using warm water, enabling up to 40 percent lower power consumption and reduced use of air conditioning. It also supports a circular energy model by recapturing waste heat for reuse or district heating. In large-scale deployments, this can lead to energy savings of up to 1 million kilowatt-hours per year per data hall.
“The selection of Lenovo Neptune liquid cooling for the HX2 supercomputer marks a significant step forward in sustainable research infrastructure,” said Kate Steele, EMEA HPC lead at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group. “By combining the high performance of Intel Xeon 6 processors with our advanced liquid-cooled ThinkSystem SC750 V4 servers, Imperial gains a powerful, efficient platform capable of supporting demanding AI and HPC workloads while dramatically reducing energy consumption. This project reflects a broader shift we’re seeing across Europe, where institutions are aligning cutting-edge computing with ambitious sustainability goals.”
The new system will be the UK’s first academic deployment of Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SC750 V4 Neptune servers with direct liquid cooling in a commercial co-location data center.
“The Imperial investment of 10 million pounds for HX2 has ensured that we can provide, in collaboration with Intel and Lenovo, a high-quality, future-proof compute platform to for our researchers,” said Andrew Richards, director of Research Computing Services (RCS) at Imperial. “We have been able to accelerate our HPC refresh using the latest sustainable platform and enable our academics to accelerate their research.”
Dugan Witherick, head of RCS Platforms at Imperial, said: “The new direct water-cooled system, based on Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SC750 V4 Neptune platform, will push forward Imperial’s commitment to sustainability, whilst ensuring the highest quality compute for our community.”
Kelly Zhang, lecturer in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial, said: “My research group is using both CPUs and GPUs for jobs for developing decision-making algorithms for healthcare settings. Specifically, many are working with the ICU electronic health record dataset MIMIC. I’m excited to see what HX2 can offer for my group’s workloads. Having such a powerful yet sustainable cluster is such a privilege.”
