Recently, the British Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) signed an agreement with Lenovo Group. Lenovo (00992) will deploy the most advanced HPC (High Performance Computing) system for the STFC Hartley Center.

This set of HPCs is ten times more powerful than its predecessor, but thanks to Lenovo's direct water cooling technology, electricity consumption has been drastically reduced, and it will support artificial intelligence research in the UK. This new set of HPCs is part of the Hartley Center's £210 million Hartley National Digital Innovation Center (HNCDI) project, which provides the UK industry with cutting-edge digital technology and expertise.

This set of HPCs will be installed later this year at a new £30 million high-performance computing center currently under construction.

The Lenovo ThinkSystem Neptune's calculation speed is 44.7 trillion times, and it can perform more than 44 trillion floating-point operations per second. For example, if you do calculations every second, it would take almost 1.4 billion years to reach that figure.

The new GPU-based system is ideal for artificial intelligence workloads and marks a major leap forward in Hartley's central capabilities, with 10 times the processing power of the current system Scafell Pike.

Additionally, it will be more energy efficient, take up less space, and use less electricity per unit of performance. Using innovative warm water cooling, the new HPC can reduce energy requirements by up to 40% while improving performance by up to 10%.

The Hartley Center is located at STFC's Daresbury Laboratory, located in the Liverpool metropolitan area of Science-Tech Daresbury. It is the only high-performance computing center dedicated to the industry in the UK, which will drive innovation in industry and applications.

Its HNCDI project aims to provide businesses with the skills and technical knowledge to play a critical role in adopting emerging digital technologies, including high-performance computing, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence. It enables the productivity, innovation, and growth of UK organizations by using these advanced high-performance computing techniques, which are generally only open to academia and large industries.

At HNCDI, new high-performance computers will focus on solutions to global challenges in weather and climate modelling, clean energy measures, drug discovery, health technology, new materials, automotive development, and legal applications.

Ultimately, new high-performance computers will improve the time efficiency of research tasks and reduce costs. This includes research for institutions such as the Met Office (Met Office), Unilever (Unilever), and Rolls Royce (Rolls Royce), which the Hartley Center has collaborated with for the past 10 years.

Kate Royse, director of STFC's Hartley Center, said: “We are very excited to partner with Lenovo Group to develop the next generation of high-performance computers at the Hartley Center. Our mission is to provide the UK industry with the knowledge, skills and computing power needed to unlock the full potential of advanced digital technology. With the new high-performance computers, we will be able to support the use of big data and artificial intelligence technology in the UK industry, enabling UK businesses to play a leading international role in the responsible adoption and use of artificial intelligence technology.”

The mission of the Science, Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartley Center is to transform the UK industry through high-performance computing, data analysis, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology. As part of UK research and innovation, the Hartley Center has some of the most advanced computing, data and artificial intelligence technology in the UK.