Lenovo has entered into a joint research project with the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Hartree Centre, focused on improving the energy-efficiency of high-performance computing systems. The Hartree Centre is a research collaboration between STFC's Scientific Computing Department and business, and focuses on bringing together the U.K.'s facility dedicated to high-performance computing teamed with world-renowned experience and expertise.

For this project, the Hartree Centre is researching the challenges of power consumption in computing and the performance effects of scale-out versus scale-up systems given a defined power budget. Hartree will also be developing software intellectual property and defining best practices regarding ARM-based server deployments. While ARM technology has shown promise, the biggest hurdle to overcome is the build-out of an ecosystem to support a production environment.

"This is a fantastic opportunity to meet the challenge of developing a computationally powerful and energy-efficient platform based on the 64-bit ARM v8 microprocessor," said Neil Morgan, program manager, Energy Efficient computing, STFC Hartree Centre. "The Hartree Centre will be actively developing a robust software ecosystem encompassing compilers, linkers, numerical libraries and tools – all of which are fundamental to the adoption of these types of technologies."

The majority of today's servers are designed to be deployed across a wide-spectrum of workloads. This research effort will be focused initially on a narrow set of application environments with the goal of optimizing performance/watt and performance/cost for these select workloads.

As part of this collaboration, Lenovo is developing an ARM-based server prototype as an extension to their dense computing platform NeXtScale. The NeXtScale ARM server will be based on the Cavium ThunderX SoC (system on chip). The NeXtScale enclosure is fitting in a standard 19-inch rack and can hold up to 12 ARM-based servers, delivering 1,152 cores while occupying only 6U of rack space. Each ARM chip has up to 48 cores, and can operate at a frequency of up to 2.5GHz.

Low-power ARM chips are used in most smartphones and tablets, and server makers hope they will bring higher levels of power efficiency to servers as well. Data center servers, especially those supporting cloud services and applications, are handling increasing processing burdens. Companies like Facebook and Google that run huge data centers are interested in ARM servers as a route to lower electricity bills.

Lenovo is the last of the top three server makers to get in on the ARM game. HP already offers ARM processors for its Moonshot dense server, while Dell is still experimenting with the architecture in its servers.

Besides Cavium, AppliedMicro, AMD, Broadcom, and others are supplying chips for ARM servers.