At Dell Technologies, we are committed to driving human progress. We believe in advancing sustainability and fighting global climate change, starting with our supply chain all the way through to our global recycling services.
As part of this commitment, we want to celebrate customers running the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world. These organizations are using innovative power and cooling methods to dramatically reduce the amount of energy required to fuel the future.
The super-green supercomputers are ranked twice a year on the Green500 list. The most recent list features 20 green supercomputers powered by Dell Technologies. The following are three highlights from the list.
Cambridge University
Number three on the Green500, Cambridge University’s Wilkes-3 expansion is comprised of PowerEdge XE8545 servers with 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors and NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs with NVLink. These dual socket servers are a powerhouse for AI and advanced computing workloads – an ideal match for Cambridge’s data-driven research.
Together with existing PowerEdge servers, the Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3) system is projected to deliver four petaflops of application performance—or four quadrillion floating point operations per second—to advance research across astrophysics, nuclear fusion power generation and lifesaving clinical medicine applications.
HPC5 at Eni
Eni’s HPC5 supercomputer is number 19 on the Green500 and is comprised of PowerEdge C4140 servers with Intel Xeon Scalable processors and NVIDIA V100 SXM GPUs and NVLink. In total, the machine has access to more than 3,400 computing processors and 10,000 GPUs. With just one watt of power, a GPU can carry out over 10,000 million billion mathematical operations.
Dedicated to reshaping the future of energy, the system uses room-temperature air cooling for most of the year, and has a constant energy supply from a 1 megawatt field of solar panels.
HPC5 enables Eni to use Big Data to accelerate research and development from non-fossil energy sources. Thanks to the hard work, innovation and experience of Eni’s people, this powerful technology will be a vital tool in defining the energy of the future, speeding up energy transition and implementing processes supporting exploration and renewable sources.
Super Cedar at Simon Fraser University and Compute Canada
Dell Technologies also powers one of the greenest supercomputers in Canada — the Cedar (GPU) cluster at Simon Fraser University. Cedar is also an extremely energy-efficient system. Currently number 29 on the Green500, Super Cedar has a power utilization efficiency (PUE) ratio of 1.07 with only seven percent of consumed power going to utilities, e.g. cooling pumps. This impressive ratio also takes advantage of the naturally cool Canadian climate.
Cedar provides the computing power Canadian researchers need to achieve transformational innovations that directly benefit Canadians. Just some of these include personalized medicine for better patient care, green technologies to help fight climate change and artificial intelligence research that will contribute to the Canadian economy.
From the TOP500 to your organization
Even if a supercomputer isn’t in your future, Dell Technologies provides innovations that can increase the power efficiency of your HPC and other systems. For example, the Dell PowerEdge C6520 Servers with Direct Liquid Cooling, allowing you to deploy 23% more equipment within existing space constraints. Dell Technologies has also developed a configuration that utilizes rack-scale coolant distribution units to service multiple racks, reducing energy requirements for cooling by up to 56%.
If you’d like to consume HPC and AI as-a-Service with a lower carbon footprint, Dell Technologies partner Verne Global® uses 100% renewable hydropower and geothermal energy to power their data center, and naturally cool outside air for free air cooling in Iceland. They also offer the ability to choose direct liquid cooling for higher-density configurations.
Dell Technologies is extremely proud to be changing the world together with these pioneering partners. Get a glimpse of the HPC & AI Innovation Lab and read about our commitment to driving human progress.
