Infosys, a specialist in digital services and consulting, says it will be responsible for transferring Daimler’s high-performance computing (HPC) workloads – used for design and simulation of vehicles and automated driving technologies – to one of Europe’s greenest data centers, Lefdal Mine Datacenter in Norway. The shift is seen as an important milestone in Daimler’s journey to deliver on its Ambition 2039 sustainability mission to become CO2 neutral by 2039.
Data centers currently account for around 1% of total global energy use and demand for their services is expected to increase by 60% by 2022. As next-generation technologies continue to develop, engineering and other high-performance workloads that run complex algorithms – such as those required for simulating sensors and journeys for autonomous vehicles – are increasingly critical to auto makers. However, these workloads consume a considerable amount of energy and make a substantial contribution to the carbon footprint of enterprises worldwide.
Building on its strategic partnership with Daimler to drive hybrid cloud-powered innovation and transform the latter’s IT infrastructure, Infosys says it offered a solution to help the OEM shift its HPCs to green infrastructure using Infosys’ Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) offering in the Nordic region. Through the initiative, Infosys will manage the IT infrastructure in its entirety, and Lefdal Mine Datacenter will provide a world-leading, sustainable, energy-efficient facility.
Jan Brecht, chief information officer at Daimler and Mercedes-Benz, commented, “A large proportion of our IT energy consumption comes from our data centers, which require significant power for computing and cooling. That’s why we’re transforming our data centers with the support of our partner, Infosys, bringing particularly the high-performance computing into one energy-efficient solution at Lefdal Mine Datacenter.”
Norway is becoming well known for green data centers because 100% of the power production in the region is renewable and transmission loss is reduced to a minimum. Lefdal Mine Datacenter offers one of Europe’s greenest data center solutions, supplying capacity that is both air- and water-cooled.
The data center is in a mine next to a deep, cold fjord with a stable and low temperature for effective cooling. Compared with data centers that are cooled by air alone, Lefdal Mine Datacenter is unaffected by warm days and doesn’t require evaporative systems for cooling. Furthermore, its water usage effectiveness is rated zero. This system leads to a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ranging from 1.10 to 1.15 depending on UPS configuration and scale of capacity. The data center is a world-leading facility for HPC environments.
