The UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has picked Lenovo to build and install a 44.7-Petaflops liquid cooled supercomputer.

The ThinkSystem will reside at the agency's Hartree Center in Daresbury, about a half hour drive outside of Liverpool, where it will "power AI research for UK industry," according to a Lenovo [1]announcement released on Tuesday.

Lenovo declared the new supercomputer will be "strategically positioned to contribute to discovery-led industrial research, focusing on solutions to global challenges in areas such as: weather and climate modelling, cleaner energy initiatives, drug discover, health technologies, new materials, automotive advancements and legal applications."

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Construction of a £30 million ($37.8 million) facility that will house the Lenovo supercomputer began [3]last February .

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The system is billed as being ten times more powerful than the Hartree Center's Scafell Pike system, yet requires less energy thanks to a direct warm water cooling system using Lenovo's Neptune technology.

Lenovo revealed the HPC will be GPU-based, but did not provide any further details.

[6]One rack. 120kW of compute. Taking a closer look at Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72 beast

[7]Lenovo to offer certified refurbished PCs and servers

[8]In just one year, UK.gov's direct spend on AWS rises 76 percent

[9]One rack. 120kW of compute. Taking a closer look at Nvidia's DGX GB200 NVL72 beast

A 1U Lenovo Neptune The Reg [10]spied at 2022's Supercomputing Conference was configured with dual AMD Genoa CPUS and four Nvidia H100 GPUs. Systems like Lenovo's 3U [11]SR675 V3 also employ Neptune cooling and can hold four H100s with 4x NVLink connected SXM5 GPUs.

Scafell Pike also uses liquid cooling. The BullSquana X1000 system [12]contains 24,960 Intel Skylake cores and "tightly coupled Intel and Nvidia architectures."

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The Hartree Centre is the UK's only – or, depending which organization is speaking, one of the UK's only – supercomputing center dedicated to industry engagement. The Lenovo supercomputer will become a part of the center's £210 million ($265 million) Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) program, which supports businesses and public sector orgs that want to upskill and adopt AI.

The program is already [14]supported by IBM. ®

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[1] https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/stfc-hartree-centre-lenovo-supercomputer/

[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZgP8T6-MbH0hTP2aEXv@rQAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[3] https://www.ukri.org/news/new-30-million-supercomputer-centre-at-daresbury-laboratory/

[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZgP8T6-MbH0hTP2aEXv@rQAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZgP8T6-MbH0hTP2aEXv@rQAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/21/nvidia_dgx_gb200_nvk72/

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/01/lenovo_certified_refurbished_hardware/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/13/aws_sees_direct_uk_government/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/21/nvidia_dgx_gb200_nvk72/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/19/liquid_cooling_sc22/

[11] https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/servers-storage/servers/racks/thinksystem-sr675-v3/len21ts0007

[12] https://www.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/technologies/high-performance-computing/

[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZgP8T6-MbH0hTP2aEXv@rQAAAM4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[14] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-06-03-UK-STFC-Hartree-Centre-and-IBM-Begin-Five-Year,-210-Million-Partnership-to-Accelerate-Discovery-and-Innovation-with-AI-and-Quantum-Computing

[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/