Harvard builds liquid-cooled supercomputer with Lenovo and Intel

Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing is building a supercomputing cluster using the latest Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 NeXtScale servers with "Neptune" liquid cooling technology and 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 processors.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC)'s newest and largest HPC cluster, which is named after the legendary American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, is comprised of more than 30,000 2nd gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor cores. Lenovo’s Neptune liquid cooling technology uses the superior heat conducting efficiency of water versus air.

Though the Cannon storage system is spread across multiple locations, the primary compute is housed in the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, a LEED Platinum-certified data center in Holyoke, MA. The Cannon cluster includes 670 Lenovo ThinkSystem SD650 servers featuring Lenovo Neptune™ direct-to-node water-cooling, and Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 processors consisting of 24 cores per socket and 48 cores per node. Each Cannon node is now several times faster than any previous cluster node, with jobs like geophysics models of the Earth performing 3-4 times faster than the previous system. In the first four weeks of production operation, Cannon completed over 4.2 million jobs utilizing over 21 million CPU hours.

“Science is all about iteration and repeatability. But iteration is a luxury that is not always possible in the field of university research because you are often working against the clock to meet a deadline,” said Scott Yockel, director of research computing at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “With the increased compute performance and faster processing of the Cannon cluster, our researchers now have the opportunity to try something in their data experiment, fail, and try again. Allowing failure to be an option makes our researchers more competitive.”