Happy National Exascale Day from Lenovo 

Sponsored Content by Lenovo

Today, Lenovo is happy to recognize National Exascale Day. Each year, October 18^th marks the day for the IT industry, researchers and scientists to reflect on their revolutionary findings in energy, medicine and materials science using the computational power of the fastest supercomputers across the globe. The date itself is not a coincidence. Exascale computing systems can do one quintillion calculations each second or 10¹⁸.

1,000,000,000,000,000,000.  For those who weren’t counting, that’s 18 zeros after the one.  One billion, billion calculations in a second.  Using hand calculators to do a simple calculation of 1+1=2, it would take more than two months for the entire population of the earth to perform the same number of calculations that an Exascale level supercomputer could do in a single second.

So, what do superfast, Exascale supercomputers mean to you?  Well, first of all, it means you don’t have to worry about spending two months pounding the keys of a TI35 with the rest of humanity.  It also means things like personalized versus localized or regionalized weather forecasting, making storms less deadly.  It means that accelerated drug development, and personalized medicine.  It means that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will help to engineer everything in the future, making the cars we drive, the buildings we occupy and the airplanes we fly safer, longer lasting and more efficient.  Exascale means that we are now entering an era where compute capacity is no longer the barrier to discovery.

There will, no doubt, be challenges along the road to Exascale.  Heat will be the number one challenge.  As CPUs, GPUs, and even components like memory increase in speed and throughput, they generate more heat within the system.  A lot more heat.  Traditional air cooling will be insufficient to deal with that type of heat yet still maintain the density and small footprints to which we have become accustomed.   That’s why Lenovo Neptune^TM  liquid cooling technology run the gamut from water loop cooling direct to each node, to liquid enabled heat sinks and liquid-to-air (L2A) heat exchangers that work inside air cooled data centers without adding any plumbing.

Implementing powerful supercomputers is usually the role of large powerhouse corporations, government labs or research centers. However, Lenovo is committed to bringing the technologies of exascale to organizations of all sizes, to extract powerful data insights. We call it, “From Exascale to Everyscale^TM.”   Lenovo, in partnership with industry leaders in compute, acceleration, fabric and storage, is committed to ensure that the innovations and next-gen technologies used to build HPC solutions at scale are quickly available to everyone.

Leveraging “From Exascale to Everyscale^TM,” organizations can rely on Lenovo’s proven expertise as the leading provider of supercomputers on the TOP500 to eliminate barriers, lower costs, and drive the innovation needed for faster throughput with increased compute speeds. Cutting-edge organizations like Dallara, Vienna Scientific Cluster and the University of Florida achieved faster research and development with optimized energy efficiency to tackle complex workloads to drive game-changing results with Lenovo ThinkSystem HPC.

Visit From Exascale to Everyscale^TM to learn more or to start designing your HPC solution.