Asetek® has been chosen by the University of Tromsø in Norway (UiT) for a pilot install of Asetek’s liquid cooling RackCDU™ system in the university’s High Performance Computing facility. Asetek will reduce energy consumption of the data center and enable waste heat from servers to heat the university campus.

The pilot project supports Asetek’s focus on the datacenter market and positions the company for the launch of UiT’s new 2MW data center building that is currently under construction and expected finalized in 2014.

Asetek’s RackCDU™ is a hot water, direct-to-chip, data center liquid cooling system that enables cooling energy savings exceeding 50% and density increases of 2.5x when compared to modern air cooled data centers. RackCDU removes heat from server components, memory modules and other hot spots within servers and takes it all the way out of the data center using liquid.

“I am proud that UiT has chosen to work with Asetek on their new HPC data center. Both Asetek and UiT are on the forefront of innovation in green and energy efficient data center operation,” said Andre Eriksen, Asetek’s CEO. “I am confident that the installation of RackCDU at UiT will set a new benchmark for data center energy efficiency and that this pilot award is another step towards a commercial breakthrough”.

As the northern most university of the world, UiT’s campus needs constant heating for its buildings year round. Climate change, the exploitation of resources and environmental threats are all factors that have been considered when developing the new data center. Asetek’s RackCDU can take advantage of free outdoor ambient air cooling in almost any climate in the world and this is especially true for Tromsø due to its unique geographical position. No power will be used to actively chill the water and the heated liquid generated from the data center servers that would otherwise be wasted will be used to heat the university campus.

“This collaboration with Asetek makes it possible for us to continue to deliver a competitive HPC service to our world-class researches”, said Roy Dragseth, Team Leader, HPC-Services at UiT. “In addition, we can use it to help keep our students and employees warm”, adds Svenn Hanssen, Head of Services and Applications, UiT Department of IT- Services.

By combining the effect of performance increase from and the huge savings made possible by using water cooled servers UiT will increase its compute capacity by an order of magnitude without any increase in infrastructure cost.

The installation of the first RackCDU™ is expected to take place shortly, followed by 5-6 additional installations during 2013.