Lenovo and ThinkPads are synonymous, but these innovative laptops are the proverbial tip of the iceberg as far as Lenovo is concerned. The company’s expertise and experience extends far beyond laptops and well into the realms of data centre design, supercomputing, and even advanced workplace solutions.
Built on a culture of innovation, Lenovo’s engineers are constantly finding interesting new ways to re-design and streamline not just existing infrastructure, but also to design new products and services by making them more human-centric and more sustainable. By taking end-to-end responsibility for its product stack, Lenovo is able to design more efficient solutions from the ground-up, sometimes taking that innovation in surprising directions.
Smarter, more sustainable computing
The Cannon supercomputer in Barcelona is a great example of this. Based at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), this HPC cluster is using analytical models to detect anomalies in medical scans and speed up disease detection, among other things.
A similar project at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany is modelling the brain, yet another is helping Dallara model race cars, and others are helping model weather patterns. These are powerful computing clusters featuring thousands upon thousands of CPUs and hundreds of GPUs. Understandably, they generate a lot of heat. More on this later.
Data centres are another example. Forming the backbone of IT infrastructure, data centres are crucial for the smooth operation of entire economies, not just businesses. With the rise of AI and massive IoT and the like, such centres have an outsize impact on business and productivity. At the same time, these centres consume a lot of electricity. Much like the aforementioned HPC clusters, they also generate a tonne of heat.
This is where Lenovo’s long history of innovation comes into play. Lenovo was an early and aggressive adopter of liquid cooling in servers, and these HPC clusters are cooled by Lenovo’s patented Neptune data-centre cooling tech. While this is already slashing energy costs and keeping emissions in check, the innovation doesn’t end here.
Lenovo looks at this heat as a resource, and is finding ways to repurpose it in new ways. They’re using heat exchangers to heat buildings, warm swimming pools, and are even piping that heated data-centre water under roadways to melt snow and ice rather than wastefully allowing it to dissipate into the atmosphere. It’s an unconventional solution, but Lenovo is making it work.
Re-imagining modern workplaces
The pandemic might have changed how we work, but that change was only possible thanks to next-gen collaboration tools and digital infrastructure.
The impact such tools are having extends beyond mere productivity. Children are living a better quality life because parents don’t have to choose between work and family. Mothers are able to return to work after taking a break. People with disabilities need not fear discrimination or dread the challenge of navigating a poorly optimised office environment.
As with everything Lenovo does, they started out by re-imagining the modern workplace in a post-pandemic era. Lenovo now saw work as something that employees fit into their lives rather than something they built their lives around. They realised that respecting work-life balance was important, and that meant designing tools that allowed professionals to remain productive and managers to more effectively keep an eye on progress regardless of where that work was happening.
The result? A suite of human-centric workplace solutions like Workspace Booking and Complete Conference Room Solutions that more effectively embrace hybrid work culture and enable a new era of work.
Leading with meaningful innovation
Lenovo’s HPC clusters are saving lives, its innovative and green data centre solutions are supporting the world’s economies while helping mitigate their environmental impact, and Lenovo’s collaboration tools are unlocking a whole new world of opportunity and diversity for today’s workers.
Meaningful impact of this nature isn’t easy to achieve, but Lenovo has achieved it thanks to years — perhaps decades — of investment in a culture of sustainability and innovation.
Moneycontrol Journalist were not involved in the creation of the article.
