CHILLED
EFFICIENCY Just outside the Arctic Circle, the EU is funding a data center that could break efficiency records. Max Smolaks visited Boden to find out more
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s we touched down at Luleå Airport, the pilot cheerfully informed us that the temperature outside was -26°C (-14.8°F). That’s cold, even by Swedish standards. I’ve braved this weather to see Boden Type Data Center One – an EU-funded effort to build the world’s most efficient data center. The project is part of Horizon 2020, a €77 billion ($87bn) research and innovation program aimed at securing Europe's competitiveness on the global stage. This is the eighth such program to take place since 1984. A large proportion of its initiatives are focused on cleantech and sustainability – and since data centers are responsible for anywhere between two and five percent of global electricity consumption, the industry is an obvious target for European policymakers. The prototype 500kW facility in the small town of Boden uses every trick in the book to lower its environmental impact: it runs on renewable energy and doesn’t have batteries or gensets. The data center relies on a combination of free and evaporative cooling with no need for refrigerants, and uses lowcarbon, locally-sourced building materials. Despite its small size, the project borrows design elements from hyperscale data
centers, like slab concrete floors (rather than raised tiles), and a lack of plenum - instead, there's a version of the ‘chicken coop’ ventilation design, originally made famous by Yahoo. The first batch of servers housed in the facility was previously used by Facebook, and arrived prepackaged in a ‘rack and roll’ configuration. There are sensor arrays deployed throughout the building - collecting extensive data for analysis is one of the objectives of the project. But the main goal is to see if it's possible to build a data center that enjoys the cost benefits of hyperscale facilities, but comes in any size. "What we are doing with this project is we are creating a very efficient, and therefore low cost, operating system, we are creating a very low cost building system, which is going to enable the little guys," said Alan Beresford, managing director of British evaporative cooling specialist EcoCooling, at the Boden Type inauguration event. “By little, I mean truly small operators, compared to the world
12 DCD Magazine • datacenterdynamics.com
Max Smolaks News Editor
of multi-gigawatt operators: less than 100kW.” In line with Horizon 2020 requirements for cross-border cooperation, the project brings together organizations from four European countries; it's a collaboration between Boden Business Agency (Sweden), engineering firm H1 Systems (Hungary), EcoCooling (UK), and two research organizations - Fraunhofer IOSB (Germany) and RISE SICS North (Sweden). Work on the project kicked off in October 2017. BBA was responsible for things like planning permissions and negotiations with local politicians; H1 Systems managed the construction work; EcoCooling contributed its proprietary free cooling tech; Fraunhofer designed synthetic workloads to put the facility through its paces, while RISE was tasked with monitoring, data collection and analysis. Like the buildings around it, the exterior of the data center is painted deep red: the color is known as Falu red, after the copper mine in the nearby town of Falun. Inside, there are three data halls – the first has been
"We are trying to push forward the current benchmarking and metrics of energy efficiency"