RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.
and DARESBURY, CHESHIRE, U.K.,
Feb. 17, 2015 /PRNewswire/
-- Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) today announced that it has
entered into a joint research project with the Science and
Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Hartree Centre, focused on
improving the energy-efficiency of high-performance computing
systems. The Hartree Centre is a research collaboration between
STFC's Scientific Computing Department and business, and focuses on
bringing together the U.K.'s foremost facility dedicated to
high-performance computing teamed with world-renowned experience
and expertise.
For this project, the Hartree Centre is researching the
challenges of power consumption in computing and the performance
effects of scale-out versus scale-up systems given a defined power
budget. Hartree will also be developing software intellectual
property and defining best practices regarding ARM-based server
deployments. While ARM technology has shown promise, the biggest
hurdle to overcome is the build-out of an ecosystem to support a
production environment.
"This is a fantastic opportunity to meet the challenge of
developing a computationally powerful and energy-efficient platform
based on the 64-bit ARM v8 microprocessor," said Neil Morgan, program manager, Energy Efficient
computing, STFC Hartree Centre. "The Hartree Centre will be
actively developing a robust software ecosystem encompassing
compilers, linkers, numerical libraries and tools – all of which
are fundamental to the adoption of these types of
technologies."
The explosion of data, new users and new uses of this data are
placing huge burdens on IT, far outpacing budgets, available power,
and space in the data center. The benefits of highly targeted,
workload-optimized server design will be evaluated in this project
to address these challenges. The majority of today's servers are
designed to be deployed across a wide-spectrum of workloads. This
research effort will be focused initially on a narrow set of
application environments with the goal of optimizing
performance/watt and performance/cost for these select
workloads.
As part of this collaboration, Lenovo is developing an ARM-based
server prototype as an extension to their popular dense computing
platform NeXtScale. Given its open and flexible design, NeXtScale
solutions are used extensively by users of high-performance
computing, grid deployments, analytics workloads, and large-scale
cloud and virtualization infrastructures. The NeXtScale ARM server
will be based on the Cavium (NASDAQ: CAVM) ThunderX SoC (system on
chip) which has a full range of capabilities built-in to help
minimize cost and power consumption. The NeXtScale enclosure is
designed to optimize density and performance while fitting in a
standard 19-inch rack and can hold up to 12 ARM-based servers,
delivering 1,152 cores while occupying only 6U of rack space.
"Open partnerships are critical to the future of IT," said
Makoto Ono, senior research staff
member, Lenovo. "Lenovo is committed to driving innovation to
improve the efficiency of computing and we are pleased to join
forces with the STFC Hartree Centre and any other industry
leader to tackle this challenge."
ABOUT LENOVO
Lenovo (HKSE: 992) (ADR: LNVGY) is a $39
billion global Fortune 500 company and a leader in providing
innovative consumer, commercial, and enterprise technology. Our
portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers PCs
(including the legendary Think and multimode YOGA brands),
workstations, servers, storage, smart TVs and a family of mobile
products like smartphones (including the Motorola brand), tablets
and apps. Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook or Twitter
(@Lenovo) or visit us at www.lenovo.com.
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SOURCE Lenovo