HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
with great connectivity and infrastructure built on high precision and sustainability. ‘Our GPUaaS solution not only multiplies
the HPC and AI capacity, delivering energy and cost-efficient service, but it also operates as a full tech stack solution that does the legwork for our clients, so their data scientists, engineers, developers and researchers can focus on their increasingly important day job – from building solutions and services to gathering insights. D’Hauwers added: ‘Many companies
are adjusting their business models to secure stakeholders’ trust and safeguard long-term profitability. Digitalisation has had a massive impact on our climate, yielding an ever-increasing demand for electricity and rising carbon emissions because of its acceleration. Many businesses rely on technology and data to drive value to their customers, whilst also recognising this can come at a cost to the environment. Therefore, many businesses are migrating their data centre footprint to atNorth’s site in Iceland. Businesses must be exploring the best possible ways to walk the talk by adopting best practices when it comes to reducing the digital footprint of their IT and operations.’ GPUs are designed for high-density
workloads, such as advanced calculations for AI, natural language processing, scientific simulations and risk analysis. The nature of these applications, in addition to rising costs associated with using public cloud services and increased pressure on sustainability, has tasked many organisations with the challenge of finding new alternatives to ensure continuity with high-performance
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applications in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way. atNorth’s new GPUaaS will offer a much larger capacity, according to D’Hauwers. Its sites already deliver a total capacity equivalent to 125,000 A100 GPUs, with plans afoot to double this in the next 12 – 18 months. But to sustainably grow the capacity for
its HPC and AI systems, atNorth has had to be very careful about how it designs its data centres, taking advantage of the climate in the Nordics and available renewable energy sources to deliver highly efficient, HPC and AI infrastructure. ‘We rely on the fantastic weather of the Nordics,’ stated D’Hauwers. ‘When it comes to data centres and HPC, the Nordics are relatively cold, and so we
“We constantly take whatever actions are possible to make it as sustainable as possible”
take that benefit and make use of it for HPC and AI. Our users benefit from this infrastructure and deliver faster science and simulation projects. And as a result, they are capable of improving the time to market and doing this in a very sustainable way, driving towards carbon neutrality where possible. ‘And, because we do everything from
the ground up from the data centres, not just from the HPC side, but the entire integration of it as a fully managed service to the user, this allows the user to focus on their own business, their core business,’ added D’Hauwers.
‘We use 100 per cent renewable energy,’
stated D’Hauwers. ‘In Iceland, this comes primarily from geothermal energy. But, importantly, the goal is to use much less of it. Because “the energy you don’t use is the most sustainable”.’ Rising energy prices across Europe
are making cloud an even more attractive proposition than running an in-house data centre, as users can effectively outsource their IT requirements to countries with lower energy costs. D’Hauwers added: ‘So they bring [their project] to us, and they see the delta of so much less energy used, and then, on top of that, the energy is 100 per cent renewable. ‘With the current evolution of energy
prices in mainland Europe, the cost of energy has been driven up substantially, with gas prices increasing and so on. The pricing [is going] through the roof’. But D’Hauwers was keen to stress it was not just renewable energy sources but atNorth’s focus on efficient systems that can reduce overall enery consumption, which is key to the company’s vision. ‘The whole stack we deliver, the data centres are efficiently built for HPC and AI, [as well as] the way the cooling is done and the recovery of heat. ‘For example, what we do in Stockholm
is recover the heat and sell it to the municipality to heat tens of thousands of houses. We constantly take whatever actions are possible to make it as sustainable as possible. ‘Of course, these AI systems and big
supercomputers use a lot of energy, but if you can reduce that to the minimum, there is a huge benefit for research organisations,’ said D’Hauwers.
Summer 2022 Scientific Computing World 9
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