Lenovo Launches Next-Generation of Data Science Workstations

Last Updated on October 27, 2021 by Editorial Team

Author(s): Towards AI Team

In a world where the data growth rate is growing exponentially, using artificial intelligence (AI) to help businesses make more educated decisions is a useful tool. Ninety percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone, yet most companies only access about 12% of their data. Lenovo today launched a new generation of data science workstations designed to help customers use their data more effectively and gain an edge in their industries. Workstations provide a complete out-of-the-box solution including high-performance hardware, pre-installed software applications, ThinkShield security, and dedicated support to drive efficiency and boost productivity in workflows that are challenging to AI practitioners.

It is essential to prepare and train employees to use the massive amounts of data that organizations have now, which must first come from siloed sources (data lakes, IoT sensors, devices, etc). After that, it’s ready to be deployed into actionable AI, delivering the predictive insights businesses need. As any AI practitioner will share, they spend about 90 percent of their time on data preparation and processing tasks. As these workflows are both labor-intensive and computationally sophisticated, workstations excel at these tasks particularly.

Lenovo’s new data science workstation solutions simplify and optimize the deployment of an AI professional’s entire IT infrastructure in order to meet the power and performance requirements of most AI workflows. Lenovo’s Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) program offers hybrid remote computing workstations. Moreover, Lenovo’s AI workstations can be integrated with ThinkEdge and ThinkSystem AI hardware, software, and services offerings giving users access to an end-to-end solution portfolio for deploying successful AI initiatives in their organization.

The data science workstation portfolio includes the powerful ThinkStation P520 and P920 desktop workstations and the latest generation of ThinkPad P1 and P15 mobile workstations, configurable to meet users’ individual AI workflow requirements. ThinkStation desktop workstations are powered by the latest Intel Xeon processors, up to 2TB of ECC Memory, optional Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory (P920 only), and feature support for over 20TB of storage. ThinkPad P Series mobile workstations are powered by Intel Xeon processors, up to 128GB of memory, and are available in various screen sizes, weights, and form factors.

“My personal take on the ThinkStation P920 — love the high frequency, lots of storage and huge Optane memory. I can fit my entire dataset in memory, processing terabytes of data in seconds locally. Everything is under my desk. It is like driving a Tesla, when everybody else is using a bus. Overall, the P920 is my preferred data science experience on a local system.”
-Areg Melik-Adamyan, Principal AI Engineer, Intel

In addition, these data science workstations also include the new Lenovo Data Science operating system. This custom Linux OS, based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, is configurable as a factory option and features many of the industry’s most common machine and deep learning frameworks, AI development tools, and data analytics software applications. Developer tools like the Intel OneAPI AI analytics toolkit deliver pre-tuned AI frameworks for many everyday data science workflows that can help AI professionals across the enterprise to increase the speed and efficiency of their workflows drastically.

Many of the time- and resource-intensive tasks associated with setting up complex data science environments have been eliminated with Lenovo’s new data science workstations. As a result, AI practitioners are able to get up and running right away, resulting in a significantly shorter time to insight. From fraud detection and better supply chain logistics within the financial and retail industries to enhanced image analysis in healthcare, to smart maintenance and optimization in telecommunications and utilities, Lenovo’s latest data science workstation offerings provide performance, reliability, efficiency, and agility where it’s needed most.

To learn more about how Lenovo’s data science workstations can equip AI practitioners with the right tools to deliver near real-time insights, visit Lenovo Data Science.