By Lenovo, Open Innovation HPC Solutions

Celebrating its success in HPC, Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd announced the completion of its second phase deployment at CINECA – a HPC research resource with the capabilities to become an artificial intelligence compute resource.

CINECA Marconi
(Photo:  MMLibouri)

The company strengthened its position in the HPC space maintaining its #1 HPC vendor ranking in China while becoming the #2 vendor in the world in terms of total systems included on the TOP500 list.

Committed to HPC, the company unveils a generation of solutions that extend HPC benefits to a wider spectrum of users. These offerings include: Antilles – an OpenSource GUI, that simplifies system management, and the firm’s Distributed Storage Solution (DSS)- a family of scalable storage infrastructure solutions for file and object storage.

Next phase of CINECA: Game changing technology now online for researchers
Phase one of CINECA, an academic consortium, was completed in May 2016 – coming in at 1.7 PFLOPs, which at the time was the largest Intel Omni-Path Fabric system in the world. The company and CINECA announced the delivery and installation of phase two, a 3,600 node Xeon Phi processor (formerly code-named ‘Knights Landing’) system which is interconnected with 100Gb Intel Omni-Path fabric – delivering 6.2PFLOPs of performance.

Dubbed Marconi by CINECA, the installation is expected to be one of the largest HPCs in Europe and will be online for researchers to transform data into insight across such disciplines as physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and urban planning. Leveraging the firm maintained Open Source Extreme Cluster/Cloud Administration Toolkit (xCat) for system management, CINECA’s Marconi system houses the core tools which will enable it to become one of the premier machine learning and artificial intelligence systems in the world.

Lighting up Marconi
(Photo: MMLibouri)

Commitment to OpenHPC: Expanding benefits of open source to more users
One year after joining OpenHPC as a founding member, the company’s submission of an xCAT/Confluent based OpenHPC recipe for system management and provisioning was accepted by the consortium. The firm is also announcing its latest open source contribution with the initial delivery of an GUI named Antilles. The graphical web portal sits atop of a Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software suite bundling open source software enhanced with company’s configurations, plug-ins and scripts to enable a ready to use software stack.

Antilles was designed to run and manage HPC, big data and workflows on a virtualized infrastructure optimally and transparently, adjusting dynamically to the user and datacenter. It has been architected to help more users adopt OpenHPC by lowering the required expertise needed to deploy and benefit from these tools. Once a domain of only the largest HPC users, the benefits of open source are being unlocked for users of all sizes.

D3284 JBOD

Expanding Lenovo storage portfolio: Foundation for dense scalable file storage
Furthermore, the company announced a high-density disk array system for its growing storage portfolio – the D3284 JBOD. This 5U 84 disk enclosure, provides 12Gb capability with hot swap SSD and HDDs. it delivers scalability for a range of storage needs including software-defined file storage, video surveillance, and backup and archive. Leveraging this JBOD as well as the existing firm’s server and SAN portfolio, the firm introduces Distributed Storage Solution (DSS) a family of scalable infrastructure solutions for scale out file storage targeting performance and data intensive environments.

The first release will be company’s distributed storage solution for IBM Spectrum Scale (DSS-G), a software-defined storage implementation leveraging  Spectrum Scale RAID. DSS-G will support up to 670 HDDs in a single distributed RAID array enabling users to start with installation from 22 disks and scale out to over 6PB by adding additional JBODs and disks.

The new architecture speeds recovery times by 25X over the current solution and is based on a 20-year proven software stack that will deliver up to 40GB/s of performance.

DSS-G combines high storage density and I/O performance with availability, reliability and resiliency for scale-out file, parallel file sharing workloads, video streaming, and private or hybrid cloud, storage. DSS-G availability is expected in 1H 2017.

Lenovo S3200

While this JBOD and DSS expand the portfolio for density and performance, the company has become the newest reseller of Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software, providing clients choices in file systems and topologies. Lustre is available on the current family of Lenovo S Series mid-range SAN offerings.

Sanzio Bassini, director, HPC, CINECA, said: “We started off the Marconi project with a very definite idea of what our ‘ideal’ solution would be – and Lenovo met all our requirements. We are especially pleased with the energy-efficiency and the cost-effectiveness of the Lenovo solution, which were key differentiators. These, in fact, will enable CINECA’s Marconi system to expand their support to innovation in an environmentally conscious and economically affordable way, while meeting the ever-growing requirements of public and private researchers alike.”

Bina Hallman, VP, offering management executive, software-defined storage, IBM, said: “IBM Spectrum Scale is an important part of IBM’s Spectrum Suite of software-defined storage solutions, which provide our partners with confidence reliability and security. As an ecosystem that provides client choice, including cloud and innovative commodity solutions, IBM Spectrum Scale provides Lenovo a robust solution that helps brings new platforms to market quickly.”

Showcasing global breadth and flexibility to deliver HPC in all fields and sizes
As a result of company’s commitment, Lenovo has taken a greater share on the TOP500 list. After just its fifth time on the TOP500 list, its systems now power over 100 of the largest HPCs in the world, holding the #2 position in the TOP500 in terms of quantity of listing. The TOP500 list includes clients across all geographies and workloads in both research and business – Lenovo is positioned to support the needs of the world’s largest HPC clients as well as the capabilities and focus needed to make HPC accessible for smaller departmental HPC users.