Trending Articles
Trending Topics
Trending
Researchers at Imperial College London will benefit from one of the world’s most sustainable supercomputers when the HX2 is installed later this year, Intel has announced at ISC High Performance Computing 2025.
The news comes two years after Imperial College, Lenovo and Intel signed on the dotted line for a sustainable HPC with AI capabilities, with today’s announcement centering around the choice of an Intel Xeon 6 with Performance Cores.
Specifically, It will use 192 nodes with two 72-core Xeon 6960P chips and a dozen channels of DDR5 memory per CPU. I asked Intel about which, if any, AI accelerators will be in place to which it replied: “The Xeon 6900P series processors have integrated AVX and AMX units to accelerate AI/HPC workloads.”
Which is true, but, that’s still not the same as having dedicated AI accelerators.
The HX2 uses Lenovo’s water-cooled ThinkSystem SC750 V4 Neptune servers, which are designed to be more sustainable courtesy of direct water cooling. This not only cools the CPUs inside the HPC but the warmed water can be used elsewhere – for example, it can be used to heat rooms elsewhere in the facility. In this case, however, the HX2 supercomputer will sit in a commercial colocation data centre rather than on-site at Imperial College London.
It’s unclear how much the HX2 cost to build. Imperial College says it has invested £10 million (around $13.5 million), but heavy discounting may have come into play.
“This is a great win-back for Intel due in part to Xeon 6’s strong performance for bandwidth-bound AI and HPC workloads,” said Karin Eibschitz Segal, Intel Corporate Vice President and Interim General Manager of the Data Center Group.
“We’re enabling a reduction in time-to-science that will help tackle global challenges like climate and healthcare, all while lowering the total cost of ownership and environmental impact.”
Related: Why Lenovo’s customers want sustainable technology
Andrew Richards, Director of Research Computing Services at Imperial College London, said that the university has accelerated its “HPC refresh using the latest sustainable platform and enable our academics to accelerate their research”.
For example, it should help medical research. “My research group is using both CPUs and GPUs for jobs for developing decision-making algorithms for healthcare settings,” said Kelly Zhang, Lecturer in Statistics at the university.
“Specifically, many are working with the ICU electronic health record dataset MIMIC. I’m excited to see what HX2 can offer for my group’s workloads. Having such a powerful yet sustainable cluster is such a privilege.”
All three partners – Intel, Lenovo and Imperial College – are keen to emphasise the sustainable side of the HX2 supercomputer.
Not only does Lenovo’s Neptune technology remove up to 98% of system heat, the company claims, but that waste heat can be recaptured. Lenovo reckons that its customers can save up to 1 million kilowatt-hours per year per data hall.
“This project reflects a broader shift we’re seeing across Europe, where institutions are aligning cutting-edge computing with ambitious sustainability goals,” said Kate Steele, EMEA HPC lead at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.
“By combining the high performance of Intel Xeon 6 processors with our advanced liquid-cooled ThinkSystem SC750 V4 servers, Imperial gains a powerful, efficient platform capable of supporting demanding AI and HPC workloads while dramatically reducing energy consumption.”
Her point echoes one made by Stefan Brechling Larsen, Lenovo’s Global Head of Environmental Services, when I spoke to him last year.
“It’s a mixture of finance and sustainability for our customers,” he said, pointing out that Lenovo’s latest water-cooled servers tend to use less electricity than their predecessors. “When we look into the future of sustainability, those two things, once you hit both of them, that’s going to be a true benefit, right?”
Article updated 12 June 2025 with Intel’s comment about integrated AI acceleration in Xeon 6 processors.
