With all of this flexibility in place the biggest issue becomes keeping performance at its peak and managing power and cooling cost effectively. With EasyBuild and other tools, he adds, managing these additions is no longer a time-consuming hassle, most of the process is automated. Thompson says the advantages of this include being able to adopt new technologies (accelerators, new processors, etc.) as they arrive, avoiding the “ouch” factor financially with a single cluster purchase, and having the flexibility to meet user needs with the right hardware rather than a generalised resource. Like many university HPC centres that must serve a broad, diverse set of research on the same hardware, the University of Birmingham takes a build-as-we-go approach to new hardware acquisitions. In 2014, however, this meant taking some risks, both with evaluating bringing water into a data centre and later, with having Top 500-class resources that could be cobbled together seamlessly over time.

He says he anticipated, as did Tease, a need for high-end building blocks as well as an increased need to focus on efficiency. Simon Thompson is one of the hardware architecture masterminds behind compute resources at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Some of Lenovo’s forward-looking customers also saw the writing on the wall - in all capital letters, as it turns out. At the heart of that effort is the Lenovo Neptune cooling system, which features direct warm water cooling in an ultra-dense enclosure that can satisfy the density demands of HPC without overheating elements, which leads to performance degradation and shutdowns. Part of the future-proofing process for Lenovo to keep its placement as the top provider for HPC systems on the Top 500 is to continue its leadership in novel cooling technologies.

Advanced cooling technologies