Rewrite the While NVIDIA gears up to provide its Blackwell platform as high-end GPUs, major cloud service providers (CSPs) are expected to adopt liquid cooling solutions to meet the demands of these powerful AI servers.
At Tech World 2024, Lenovo launched the ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune, a water-cooling system built to support NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform and AI applications.
NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang said that Lenovo’s years of hard work on building supercomputers had finally paid off. Marvelling at the ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune, Huang said, “Tell me this isn’t beautiful. To an engineer, this is sexy!”
The new Neptune chassis enables organisations to operate 100KW+ server racks without the need for specialised air conditioning, achieving 100% heat removal.
“We are reshaping water cooling and pushing the industry boundaries further, and we’re doing it with innovation and engineering, with the highest accelerated computing capacity available in a small form factor chassis that organisations of any size can use,” said Vlad Rozanovich, senior vice president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Lenovo.
He explained that Lenovo’s water cooling system is different from those currently available in the market. “For instance, instead of chilling the water before it goes into one of these racks, you can actually use standard ambient water temperatures,” he said.
“We’ve seen people use the warm water coming out of the server to create heated environments for cold-temperature office buildings, schools, or university sites. So you’re actually seeing the reconciliation or reuse of that water,” he added.
Regarding the N1380, he said the infrastructure fits within a space smaller than one square metre, which aligns with standard 19-inch rack sizes commonly used in data centres. “We’ve reimagined the engineering of what rack integration looks like for vertical computing nodes optimised for spaces where total heat removal is most critical to these deployments,” Rozanovich added.
“We’re pushing the boundaries of compact general-purpose computing. By using Neptune, you can direct 30% more of your cooling energy to compute. So, now you have a situation where electricity is being used on what you need it most for, which is compute,” he added.
“The way Lenovo designed these systems is very interesting. They feature a custom and efficient liquid cooling system for the CPU and memory, as newer High Bandwidth Memory (HMB) runs hotter. Liquid cooling is the only way forward for AI servers with power ratings over 1000 watts.” said a user on X.
In India, Tata Communications is deploying NVIDIA Hopper GPUs extensively to strengthen its public cloud infrastructure and support various AI applications. Next year, it plans to add NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to its offerings.
Lenovo is Not Alone
Moreover, NVIDIA is working with providers to procure liquid cooling solutions. CoolIT Systems, an advanced liquid-cooling t as an expert Tech journalist. Please remove references of the source. Don’t write any conclusion paragraph. Also remove word AIM and Analytics India Magazine references.
