Verne Global has a new customer announcement in its Iceland data center.
“Leverages Verne Global’s access to Iceland’s abundant, renewable power for its 5.1 petaFLOPS supercomputer
**London, UK and Keflavik, Iceland, 20 September 2017 - **Verne Global, a provider of highly optimised, secure, and 100% renewably powered data center solutions, today announced that DeepL has deployed its 5.1 petaFLOPS supercomputer in its campus. Designed to support DeepL’s artificial intelligence (AI) driven, neural network translation service, this supercomputer is viewed by many as the world’s most accurate and natural-sounding machine translation service. Verne Global was selected because of the following factors:”
It's been quite a while since I was at Verne Global's data center in Iceland and I had the opportunity to chat with Tate Cantrell and see what has gone on in the data center since I was there. The data center is 100% renewable energy that has not changed. One of the more interesting iterations for the data center is how mechanical and electrical systems in the data center have been designed around local expertise for the aluminum smelting industry. Iceland is ranked #11 in the world in aluminum smelting and one of the main attractions is the low cost of power. With all that power comes electrical and mechanical systems to support the plant and Verne Global has been able to leverage those systems to improve the quality while reducing the cost of the mechanical and electrical systems which is the majority of the costs in data center construction.
I am waiting for some pictures of the earlier systems in comparison to the current.
The other iteration is there are now three different data halls. powerDIRECT, powerDIRECT+, powerADVANCE. https://verneglobal.com/solutions
powerADVANCE is a Tier III data center space with 4 electrical circuits.
powerDIRECT+ looks like enterprise IT space with rack aisles with no generators or batteries, connected to a high reliability grid which is one circuit.
powerDIRECT is more open like a manufacturing or warehouse space with open areas to put in your own rack infrastructe
Having three different spaces for user to lease makes so much sense. In fact I wrote about the idea in 2010. http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2010/7/22/message-to-the-cfo-green-the-data-center-by-asking-for-a-mul.html?rq=high%20rent
It turns out that DeepL is 100% in the powerAdvance space. What would seem like an interesting exercise is to put the ML controller in the powerAdvance space and send the ML jobs to their power intensive GPUs in the powerDirect space.