Karlsruhe, 22.11.2017 - The EU research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020, has awarded a three year innovation project in Northern Sweden. The aim is to prototype the most energy and cost efficient datacenter in the world.

The demand of datacenter capacity is constantly growing and at the same time the minimization of environmental impact is crucial. The mission of the project is to drive development as far as possible to meet and unify these conditions. The unique solution offers a sustainable datacenter building which is energy and resource efficient throughout its lifecycle, cheaper to build and operate and brings jobs and knowledge to remote places in large parts of Europe.

The 500kW prototype facility will be an experimental lab and demonstration site, as it will be tested by providers and end-users in a real operation environment with all aspects of its operations measured. Project stakeholders will validate feasibility, energy efficiency and usability of the prototype, as well as developing predictive models to aid in future planning and deployment of the concept. Limited colocation space is available for end-users that are willing to take part in the research experience.

“With the emergence of Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things, the amount of production and process data to manage, analyze and exploit is expected to explode into true Big Data. Thus, energy efficient data centers will play a vital role,” said Thomas Usländer of the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB.“ Fraunhofer IOSB is delighted and privileged to be part of this strong consortium.”

Usländer’s Department for Information Management and Production Control will design application oriented loads for realistic test runs of the prototype data center. As Usländer added, “High performance architectures integrating the edge, fog and cloud levels of data processing are an enabling technology for the Industrial Internet of Things.”