Lenovo recognized for outstanding hardware capabilities in servers and storage
By:
Madhu Matta, vice president and general manager, AI and HPC Segment, Lenovo Data Center Group @mmmatta18 and
Roderick Lappin, senior vice president, sales and marketing, Lenovo Data Center Group @RodderickLappin
At Lenovo, we’re focused on working with our customers as they look to leverage high-performance computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, big data analytics and much more to solve some of the world’s biggest humanitarian challenges.
Onsite at Supercomputing 2017 in Denver, Colorado, Lenovo is incredibly proud to announce its customers, Vestas and the University of Birmingham, have been recognized as finalists in the 2017 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards for their efforts in promoting clean energy and solving the Zika virus, respectively. The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors.
In the category of Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics (Reader’s Choice), Vestas was recognized for its work utilizing Lenovo hardware to collect and analyze data to pinpoint the most optimal locations for wind turbines and identify any issues that may arise, ensuring customers will receive the best energy output and highest revenue. This insight provides customers with vital information including how much electricity their proposed site will produce, and provides customers with the ability to analyze streaming data, that can help spot issues before they start affecting energy production. The Lenovo cluster is essential to running the compute-intensive streaming data analyses and simulations.
In addition, the University of Birmingham was awarded Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry) for its work with the CLIMB (Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics) project, an initiative which, alongside other industry leading technology vendors, provides computational resources for projects that globally impact public health (such as Ebola and Zika). The system is built over four university sites and uses a combination of Lenovo hardware underpinned by IBM Spectrum Scale and RedHat Ceph software, as well as OpenStack to provide cloud access. Since its inception, the project has had a direct impact on public health both within the UK and globally, as well as provided critical training, skills and resources to the next generation of Microbial Bioinformaticians.
The University of Birmingham also earned recognition for Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences for use of Lenovo HPC solutions in tracking and identifying the origin of the Zika virus, critical information at the height of the Zika scare in February 2016. With the help of the CLIMB platform, UK and Brazilian researchers at the University of Birmingham were able to deploy portable genome sequencing on a Top Gear-style road trip around Brazil to analyze Zika genome data in real-time. This has resulted in an entirely new approach to sequencing Zika genomes, including the release of datasets publically via Github and online forums, and ultimately demonstrated unambiguously that Zika had been circulating in Brazil and the Americas a full year before the first cases were detected clinically.
In addition to the recognition of the outstanding work of its customers, Lenovo received product-level recognition for its ThinkSystem SD530 and DSS-G server and storage solutions, respectively.
For Best HPC Server Product or Technology, the Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530, which is already in use at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center for critical science and engineering research, combines density, flexibility, and energy efficiency to deliver a high quality performance on a supercomputer available to users of all sizes. The system’s easy design and installation allows nodes to be removed from the rack for maintenance and service without disconnecting the machine from power. HPCwire editors consider it the perfect system for clients mandating high IO capacity and performance, as each of servers supports up to six hot swappable HDD/SDD/NVMe drives.
Lenovo’s fully integrated DSS-G storage solution, awarded Best HPC Storage Product or Technology by HPCwire, combines its off-the-shelf server and storage components with the newest native RAID functionality. A single building block scales up to five PetaBytes in 34U and can achieve more than 40 GBytes per performance. Information lifecycle management, adaptive super-fast rebuilds, silent bit error correction, preventive error management and near linear scaling with additional building blocks are all critical features that make this an ideal product.
We look forward to continuing our innovative work with Vestas and the University of Birmingham, as well as other customers, to advance the role of technology in solving the world’s most complex challenges.
The full list of winners were revealed at the HPCwire booth at the event. More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website (http://www.HPCwire.com) or on Twitter through the following hashtag: #HPCwireAwards.
More about Lenovo news at Supercomputing 2017 can be found here.
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