Northern Data AG Commissions First Data Center in the Netherlands

Significant expansion step due to high demand for HPC infrastructure

Further locations shortly before commissioning

Computing power of 404 Petaflops by the end of Q1/2021

Northern Data AG, a leading provider of High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions, is commissioning its latest HPC data center near Maastricht. This new facility will entail one of the largest GPU clusters worldwide and will be the Company’s first data center location in the European Union. The Company will begin installing the first hardware for its GPU-based Distributed Computing Cluster from the beginning of December. The GPU cluster is one of Northern Data AG’s most significant expansion steps and is expected to be scaled up by the end of Q1/2021 to achieve computing power of 404 Petaflops (FP64). With this level of power, it will be one of the largest GPU clusters of its kind worldwide. The world’s most powerful supercomputer, Japan’s Fugaku, has a computing capacity of 415 Petaflops.

Recommended AI News: Insurtech Pier Receives an Investment of US$ 14.5 Million

As CEO Aroosh Thillainathan commented: “With the smooth and rapid expansion of our GPU cluster, now including our first European location, we are moving to meet the very high demand for stable, reliable and cost-efficient High-Performance Computing infrastructure. Our highly specialized teams have done an excellent job over the past few months to lay this foundation for future growth in a very short timespan. We are well on course, and thanks to our GPU cluster, we shall be offering HPC services in the fields of artificial intelligence, deep learning, research and rendering as early as the first half of next year, with maximum scalability and optimum time- and cost-efficiency.”

The cooling technology to be deployed in the Netherlands data center is based on an air-cooling system developed by the Company itself, which delivers an excellent PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) figure of between 1.05 and 1.04. The PUE value indicates the level of energy being consumed by a computing facility relative to the energy actually delivered to the computing equipment. PUEs of 2.0 are regarded as average, 1.5 as efficient and figures less than 1.2 as very efficient.

Recommended AI News: Canon Identifies and Addresses Data Security Incident

In addition to the proprietary cooling technology, the Maastricht facility will make use of Northern Data’s own management software, which enables the documentation and rapid configuration and commissioning of the server hardware. The software automates the entire process of continuously optimizing the operating parameters of the servers and the entire HPC data center itself.

This new facility in the Netherlands is the first of several new locations for Northern Data AG, which, due to the high demand, also intends to establish HPC data centers in Germany, Scandinavia and Canada.

Recommended AI News: Blackbaud Announces Expanded Relationship with the Salvation Army Australia