Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack

The Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack combines open-source with proprietary best-of-breed Supercomputing software to provide the most consumable open-source HPC software stack embraced by all Lenovo HPC customers.

It provides a fully tested and supported, complete but customizable HPC software stack to enable the administrators and users in optimally and environmentally sustainable utilizing their Lenovo Supercomputers.

The software stack is built on the most widely adopted and maintained HPC community software for orchestration and management. It integrates third party components especially around programming environments and performance optimization to complement and enhance the capabilities, creating the organic umbrella in software and service to add value for our customers.

The software stack offers key software and support components for orchestration and management, programming environments and services and support, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 1. Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack

Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack is a modular software stack tailored to our customer's needs. Thoroughly tested, supported and periodically updated, it combines the latest open-source HPC software releases to enable organizations with an agile and scalable IT infrastructure.

The Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack provides the following benefits to customers.

Overcoming the Complexity of HPC Software

An HPC system software stack consists of dozens of components, that administrators must integrate and validate before an organization’s HPC applications can run on top of the stack. Ensuring stable, reliable versions of all stack components is an enormous task due to the numerous interdependencies. This task is very time consuming because of the constant release cycles and updates of individual components.

The Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack is fully tested, supported and periodically updated to combine the latest open-source HPC software releases, enabling organizations with an agile and scalable IT infrastructure.

Benefits of the Open-source Model

Going forward, in IDC's opinion, the development model exemplified by Linux is more workable. In this model, stack development is driven primarily by the open-source community and vendors offer supported distributions with additional capabilities for customers that require and are willing to pay for them. As the Linux initiative demonstrates, a community-based model like this has major advantages for enabling software to keep pace with requirements for HPC computing and storage hardware systems.

This model delivers new capabilities faster to users and makes HPC systems more productive and higher returning investments.

A fair number of foundational open source HPC software components already exist (e.g., Open MPI, Rocky Linux, Slurm, OpenStack, and others). Many HPC community members are already taking advantage of these.

Customers will benefit from the HPC community, as the community works to integrate a multitude of components that are commonly used in HPC systems and are freely available for open source distribution.

The key open-source components of the software stack are:

• Confluent Management

  Confluent is Lenovo-developed open-source software designed to discover, provision, and manage HPC clusters and the nodes that comprise them. Confluent provides powerful tooling to deploy and update software and firmware to multiple nodes simultaneously, with simple and readable modern software syntax.

• Slurm Orchestration

  Slurm is integrated as an open source, flexible, and modern choice to manage complex workloads for faster processing and optimal utilization of the large-scale and specialized high-performance and AI resource capabilities needed per workload provided by Lenovo systems. Lenovo provides support in partnership with SchedMD.

• LiCO Webportal

  Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) is a Lenovo-developed consolidated Graphical User Interface (GUI) for monitoring, managing and using cluster resources. The web portal provides workflows for both AI and HPC, and supports multiple AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, Caffe, Neon, and MXNet, allowing you to leverage a single cluster for diverse workload requirements.

• Energy Aware Runtime

  EAR is a powerful European open-source energy management suite supporting anything from monitoring over power capping to live-optimization during the application runtime. Lenovo is collaborating with Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) and EAS4DC on the continuous development and support and offers three versions with differentiating capabilities.

Components are covered in the following sections:

• Orchestration and management
• Programming environment

Orchestration and management

The following orchestration software is available with Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack:

• Confluent (Best Recipe interoperability)

  Confluent is Lenovo-developed open source software designed to discover, provision, and manage HPC clusters and the nodes that comprise them. Our Confluent management system and LiCO Web portal provide an interface designed to abstract the users from the complexity of HPC cluster orchestration and AI workloads management, making open-source HPC software consumable for every customer. Confluent provides powerful tooling to deploy and update software and firmware to multiple nodes simultaneously, with simple and readable modern software syntax. Additionally, Confluent’s performance scales seamlessly from small workstation clusters to thousand-plus node supercomputers. For more information, see the Confluent documentation.

• Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (Best Recipe interoperability)

  Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) is a Lenovo-developed software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters for High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) environments. LiCO provides a consolidated Graphical User Interface (GUI) for monitoring and usage of cluster resources, allowing you to easily run both HPC and AI workloads across a choice of Lenovo infrastructure, including both CPU and GPU solutions to suit varying application requirements.

  LiCO Web portal provides workflows for both AI and HPC, and supports multiple AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, Caffe, Neon, and MXNet, allowing you to leverage a single cluster for diverse workload requirements. For more information, see the LiCO product guide.

• LiCO customization service
  Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) customization services enable customers to request customized features tailored for their own needs. The service is evaluated and quoted in the form of man-days, based on the actual order list.
  HPC solution sellers need to provide pre-sales support, collaborate with HPC architects, and communicate with LiCO's R&D team (Ding Hong dinghong1@lenovo.com) for workload evaluations. A quote is provided by Lenovo based on the output SOW and analysis of the workload. After the sellers place an order, they will email the R&D team to request implementation. The LiCO R&D team will deliver the work based on the order content and SOW.

• Slurm

  Slurm is a modern, open-source scheduler designed specifically to satisfy the demanding needs of high-performance computing (HPC), high throughput computing (HTC) and AI. Slurm is developed and maintained by SchedMD® and integrated within LiCO. Slurm maximizes workload throughput, scale, reliability, and results in the fastest possible time while optimizing resource utilization and meeting organizational priorities. Slurm automates job scheduling to help admin and users manage the complexities of on-prem, hybrid, or cloud workspaces. Slurm workload manager executes faster and is more reliable ensuring increased productivity while decreasing costs. Slurm’s modern, plug-in-based architecture runs on a RESTful API supporting both large and small HPC, HTC, and AI environments. Allow your teams to focus on their work while Slurm manages their workloads.

• NVIDIA Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) (ISV supported)

  NVIDIA Unified Fabric Manager (UFM) is InfiniBand networking management software that combines enhanced, real-time network telemetry with fabric visibility and control to support scale-out InfiniBand data centers. For more information, see the NVIDIA UFM product page.

  The two UFM offerings available from Lenovo are as follows:

  • UFM Telemetry for Real-Time Monitoring

    The UFM Telemetry platform provides network validation tools to monitor network performance and conditions, capturing and streaming rich real-time network telemetry information, application workload usage, and system configuration to an on-premises or cloud-based database for further analysis.

  • UFM Enterprise for Fabric Visibility and Control

    The UFM Enterprise platform combines the benefits of UFM Telemetry with enhanced network monitoring and management. It performs automated network discovery and provisioning, traffic monitoring, and congestion discovery. It also enables job schedule provisioning and integrates with industry-leading job schedulers and cloud and cluster managers, including Slurm and Platform Load Sharing Facility (LSF).

The following table lists all Orchestration software available with Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack.

Programming environment

The following programming software is available with Lenovo EveryScale HPC&AI Software Stack.

• NVIDIA CUDA

  NVIDIA CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model for general computing on graphical processing units (GPUs). With CUDA, developers are able to dramatically speed up computing applications by harnessing the power of GPUs. When using CUDA, developers program in popular languages such as C, C++, Fortran, Python and MATLAB and express parallelism through extensions in the form of a few basic keywords. For more information, see the NVIDIA CUDA Zone.

• NVIDIA HPC Software Development Kit

  The NVIDIA HPC SDK C, C++, and Fortran compilers support GPU acceleration of HPC modeling and simulation applications with standard C++ and Fortran, OpenACC directives, and CUDA. GPU-accelerated math libraries maximize performance on common HPC algorithms, and optimized communications libraries enable standards-based multi-GPU and scalable systems programming. Performance profiling and debugging tools simplify porting and optimization of HPC applications, and containerization tools enable easy deployment on-premises or in the cloud. For more information, see the NVIDIA HPC SDK.

The following table lists the relevant ordering part numbers.

The following software support is available with Lenovo EveryScale HPC&AI Software.

• SchedMD Slurm Support for Lenovo HPC Systems

  Slurm is part of the Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack, integrated as an open source, flexible, and modern choice to manage complex workloads for faster processing and optimal utilization of the large-scale and specialized high-performance and AI resource capabilities needed per workload provided by Lenovo systems.

  SchedMD Slurm Support service capabilities for Lenovo HPC systems include:

  • Level 3 Support: High-performance systems must perform at high utilization and performance to meet end users and management return on the investment expectations. Customers covered by a support contract can reach out to SchedMD engineer experts to promptly resolve complex workload management issues and receive answers back to complex config questions quickly, instead of taking weeks or even months to try to resolve them in-house.
  • Remote Consulting: Valuable assistance and implementation expertise that speeds custom configuration tuning to increase throughput and utilization efficiency on complex and large-scale systems. Customers can review cluster requirements, operating environment, and organizational goals directly with a Slurm engineer to optimize the configuration and meet organizational needs.
  • Tailored Slurm Training: Tailored Slurm expert training that empowers users on harnessing Slurm capabilities to speed projects and increase technology adoption. A customer scoping call before the onsite Instruction ensures coverage of specific use cases addressing organization needs. An in-depth and comprehensive technical training is delivered in a hands-on lab workshop format to help users feel empowered on Slurm best practices in their site-specific use cases and configuration.
• EAS Service and Support for EAR

  The Energy Aware Runtime is Open Source under BSD-3 license and EPL-1.0. For professional use cases in production environments, installation (remote) and support services are available. Commercial support as well as implementation services for EAR can be purchased from Lenovo under the EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack CTO and is delivered through Energy Aware Solutions (EAS). There are three different distributions of EAR: Detective Pro, Optimizer and Optimizer Pro. Detective Pro provides the basic monitoring and accounting capabilities, Optimizer adds the energy optimization and Optimizer Pro the power capping features.

  • For clusters with more than 500 nodes – call for a quote.
  • EAS does not propose installation/training without any support contract.
  • Installation/training and Support prices depend on whether the cluster has only CPUs (Intel or AMD) or CPUS + GPUS (Intel or AMD CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.
  • As Optimizer Pro and Optimizer goal is to control and/or reduce the power consumption of the system, their yearly support is priced according to the power consumption of the cluster and their associated Support Entitlement per System Power Rating (SPR). At same configuration, Optimizer Pro and Optimizer cluster power consumptions will be identical but their Support Entitlement per System Power Rating (SPR) will be different.
  • Detective Pro is the only service proposed for clusters with a Total System Power less than 127 KW and SPR value less than 10.
  • A spreadsheet is provided to compute the SPR of a cluster and its associated service prices for Detective Pro, Optimizer pro and Optimizer. For the latest spreadsheet and additional information please reach out to the product manager.

• Intel oneAPI
  The Intel oneAPI Base & HPC Toolkit is a comprehensive software development suite designed to empower developers in creating high-performance computing (HPC) solutions that exploit the full potential of modern hardware architectures. This toolkit encompasses an array of advanced tools, libraries, and compilers, enabling programmers to efficiently design, optimize, and deploy parallel applications across diverse computing platforms, including CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. With a focus on fostering code portability and performance scalability, the Intel oneAPI Base & HPC Toolkit equips developers with the means to enhance productivity, streamline software development, and achieve exceptional performance outcomes in the realm of high-performance computing.

  • For more information, see Intel® oneAPI Base and HPC Toolkit.

  • Target platforms for development and deployment can range from a small system to a large multi-node cluster requiring different support efforts.

  • Support Renewals are available.

  • For Developer-based parts if the team is above 50 Developers (SBF1 and SBEG) – call for a quote.

  • Special pricing for academic research is available.

  • Commercial parts have different part numbers if they are quoted with or without Intel hardware.

The following table lists the relevant ordering part numbers Stack (some of the product numbers are not yet released at the time of writing this product guide

Note: SchedMD Slurm Consulting w/Sr.Engineer 2REMOTE Sessions option must be selected and locked in for every SchedMD support selection.

SchedMD Slurm Onsite or Remote 3-day Training option must be selected and locked in for every SchedMD Commercial support selection. Optional for EDU & Government support selections.

The following table lists all Intel oneAPI software available with Lenovo EveryScale HPC & AI Software Stack.

The following sales training courses are offered for employees and partners (login required). Courses are listed in date order.

1. LiCO: Deployment and Configuration
   2024-01-30 | 70 minutes | Employees and Partners
   Details
   LiCO: Deployment and Configuration
   
   

   Understand the typical cluster architecture for LiCO HPC/AI. Take a look at the underlying software stack and review configuration and troubleshooting tips.

   Published: 2024-01-30
   Length: 70 minutes
   Employee link: Grow@Lenovo
   Partner link: Lenovo Partner Learning
   Course code: DHPC200
2. LiCO: Administration Capabilities
   2024-01-30 | 62 minutes | Employees and Partners
   Details
   LiCO: Administration Capabilities
   
   

   Get an overview of LiCO administration capabilities as well as a demo of the LiCO Administrator Portal in the HPC/AI version.

   Published: 2024-01-30
   Length: 62 minutes
   Employee link: Grow@Lenovo
   Partner link: Lenovo Partner Learning
   Course code: DHPC201
3. LiCO: User's Perspective
   2024-01-30 | 51 minutes | Employees and Partners
   Details
   LiCO: User's Perspective
   
   

   Consider LiCO from the data scientists' point of view and see a demo of several user capabilities. Understand how Data Scientists get productivity gains from LiCO.

   Published: 2024-01-30
   Length: 51 minutes
   Employee link: Grow@Lenovo
   Partner link: Lenovo Partner Learning
   Course code: DHPC202
4. Enterprise Deployment of AI and Phases of Model Development
   2023-09-15 | 13 minutes | Employees and Partners
   Details
   Enterprise Deployment of AI and Phases of Model Development
   
   

   Lenovo Senior AI Data Scientist Dr. David Ellison whiteboards the concepts of using the data from multiple sources to derive customer benefits through Artificial Intelligence and LiCO (Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration) software.
   
   By the end of this training, you should be able to:
   
   Define the customer benefits through Artificial Intelligence and LiCO (Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration) software.

   Published: 2023-09-15
   Length: 13 minutes
   Employee link: Grow@Lenovo
   Partner link: Lenovo Partner Learning
   Course code: DAIS101
5. Selling Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration
   2021-08-25 | 18 minutes | Employees and Partners
   Details
   Selling Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration
   
   

   The goal of this course is to help ISG and Business Partner sellers understand Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestration (LiCO) software. Learn when and how to propose LiCO in order to continue the conversation with the customer and making a sale.

   Published: 2021-08-25
   Length: 18 minutes
   Employee link: Grow@Lenovo
   Partner link: Lenovo Partner Learning
   Course code: DAIS202

For more information, see these resources:

• LiCO Product Guide:
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp0858-lenovo-intelligent-computing-orchestration-lico#product-families
• LiCO website:
  https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/data-center/software/lico/
• Lenovo DSCS configurator:
  https://dcsc.lenovo.com
• Optimizing Power and Energy in HPC data centers with Energy Aware Runtime
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1646
• Energy Aware Runtime software and documentation:
  http://www.eas4dc.com
• Lenovo Confluent documentation:
  https://hpc.lenovo.com/users/documentation/
• Lenovo Compute Orchestration in HPC Data Centers with Slurm - Solution Brief:
  https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1701-lenovo-compute-orchestration-in-hpc-data-centers-with-slurm