Advertorial You needn't be an IT insider to know that data centres are the digital powerhouses behind innovational business processes, and provide the enabling force for the digital transformations that boost many enterprises' competitive edge.

Not surprisingly, data centre companies face immensely complex challenges in ensuring that their own digital infrastructures are maintained to the critical specification necessary to the task.

Technology refresh cycles have borne the brunt of the relentless pace of the generational advancement in data centre functionality. All the technology packed inside - the hardware/software architectures that make up a data centre's IT capabilities - evolves constantly. And a facility's environmental controls - cooling, power supply, security necessary to maintain operational continuity - must evolve with it.

Add to this power supply imperatives, ESG (environmental, social and governance) compliance, and the clamour to run data-intensive applications like AI, and it fast becomes clear why data centre operators want integrated solutions that help them to address the challenges.

According to Verified Market Research, the global data centre market size was valued at $229.23 billion in 2023, and is forecast to be worth $640.12 billion by 2030 - that's a CAGR of 12.3 percent. To stay ahead in this highly competitive market requires that leading data centre companies and their tech partners forge close collaborative partnerships.

Suppliers rely on frontline data centre operators to feedback information about what they need to meet customers' requirements, for example, so that OEMs have a reciprocal stake in their data centre customers' success. The relationship between sustainable data centre operator Verne (formerly Verne Global) and Intel exemplifies how working together to address common challenges in this way gives rise to mutual business benefits.

HPC performance = competitive edge

Verne entered the market in 2008, with the mission to find the best place on the planet to locate a data centre and choosing Iceland for its predictably priced and 100 percent-powered by renewable energy sources.

Fast forward to 2024 and Verne today operates facilities across Northern Europe and has become the data centre partner of choice for many financial services, life sciences, engineering and scientific research organisations. Customers in these verticals routinely now need high-performance compute platforms that can run data-intensive AI, Machine Learning analytics, large-scale simulations and even supercomputing workloads.

High-performance computing (HPC) isn't new, but has traditionally been the preserve of highly specialist use-cases. HPC platforms have long played an integral role in academic research, resolving complex problems and enabling discovery and innovation.

More recently, the scale of the data that needs to be processed by mainstream applications has proliferated to the point where they can also benefit from the power of HPC - that is, the ability to perform computationally-intensive workload operations across shared resources - to achieve results faster and more cost-effectively than using traditional computing options.

HPC workloads can be run on a single node, but its real power comes from connecting multiple HPC nodes into a cluster (or a supercomputer) with parallel data processing capabilities. Such clusters can compute, for instance, extreme-scale simulations, AI inferencing, and data analyses that would not be feasible on a single system.

To meet this growing demand for high intensity compute, Verne's facilities have been futureproofed ready for some fundamental upgrades at server level. For example, through close collaboration with long-standing technology partner Intel (the companies had been strategically aligned for more than a decade), Verne's customers can now leverage hardware for specific workload types. This hardware is located in optimised environments, aiming to deliver maximised performance.

In particular, Verne has installed Dell PowerEdge servers running Intel® Xeon® Gold 6458Q CPUs. A 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor provides a powerful 3.10GHz of speed, with 16-, 24- or 32-core counts (set via Intel® Speed Select Technology (Intel® SST). The additional advantage of these is that they offer a line-up of integrated features that, working alone or in concert with each other, address the multiple challenges of provisioning HPC platforms with optimal efficiency.

Intel® Accelerator Engine options are integral features in Intel Xeon Scalable processors, being designed to help boost performance, reduce costs, and improve power efficiency for HPC workloads and other processes. Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel® AVX-512) and Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX) capabilities can both help accelerate AI workloads and other use cases where vectorization is needed (eg HPC) without the need to install additional standalone hardware into a data centre's infrastructure, for example.

More acceleration come from the Intel® Dynamic Load Balancer (Intel® DLB) built to provide load-balanced, prioritised scheduling of events (packets) across CPU cores/threads to enable more efficient core-to-core communication.

Other accelerator options are matched to the specific needs of a given vertical's use-cases. "Data analytics in financial services or medical research can require very large in-memory data sets," Intel points out. "Our In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (Intel® IAA) increases the queries-per-second that can be performed, thereby reducing the memory footprint for analytics workloads."

In its raw state HPC has a drawback. Its higher energy consumption can drive up IT expenditure and enlarge carbon profiles, and so hamper an organisation's ability to meet sustainability targets. Further to this, discerning HPC customers are increasingly looking to place their workloads within data centres that deliver quantifiable sustainability metrics, so that they can make properly informed decisions about where their data is processed and stored, and thus scale their digital requirement to reduce its environmental impact.

Keeping cool under pressure

Traditional data centre cooling technologies, such as chiller plant/forced-air technology, can now struggle to keep pace with the continued advancements in CPUs and GPUs as deployed in both HPC and non-HPC environments. How to effectively cool new powerful server technology while also maintaining the cost-effectiveness and overall efficiency of facilities has become a priority challenge for the data centre industry and its tech providers.

Verne recognised this problem more than a decade ago when it established its 40-acre flagship data centre campus by the town of Keflavik in southwest Iceland. The frigid average temperature of the Nordic climate has since enabled year-round ambient free air cooling to reduce the energy costs and requirements of Verne's HPC installations - supporting up to 50 kW per-rack - leveraging the environment to help ultimately protect the environment.

While the free air cooling systems at Verne's Keflavik campus have proved highly effective to date, the extra level of computational density of HPC workload processing puts additional strains on cooling technologies. Intel has supported liquid cooling techniques for more than a decade, and the company believes that the path to sustainable data centres requires a revolution in cooling.

Many high-intensity use cases require more power, and Verne and Intel recognise the pressing need for cooling innovation. The two companies have been working together to deploy direct liquid cooling at Verne's campus in Pori, Finland, leveraging 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. This means that when customers need more power, Verne can easily implement liquid cooling and support over 100 kW on a single rack. Joint innovations like these enable Verne to support demanding workloads and deliver high performance that scales over generations of deployments without compromising its customers' efficiency goals.

Looking forward over the course of the next decade, the power equation for data centres is definitely going to be a challenge in certain locations. It's already a real challenge for the data centres industry, but Verne proves that it is not one that's completely insurmountable. 

https://www.theregister.com//2024/06/17/supplier_collaboration_brings_renewable_competitive/