19 August 2019
The managed platform is designed to meet the data-intensive needs of the automotive, life sciences and space/aerospace marketplaces – photo: ©GES Ltd
Cornish satellite communications innovator and space gateway Goonhilly Earth Station has opened a new green data centre designed to become a high-performance computing hub for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Its managed platform is designed to meet the data-intensive needs of the automotive, life sciences and space/aerospace marketplaces. Goonhilly, located on the Lizard Peninsula is also one of the first organisations in the UK to deploy a liquid immersion cooling system from Barcelona-based Submer Technologies.
“The biggest data centre challenges are energy consumption, carbon footprint, compute density, and space costs,” Diarmuid Daltún, chief commercial officer of Submer Technologies told Networking+. “Submer’s advanced immersion cooling systems address all four using a dielectric fluid that has 1000-times the cooling capacity of air – delivering higher performance in less space at less than half the power consumption of a traditional, air-cooled data centre. It’s the perfect complement to Goonhilly’s green-energy platform.”
Goonhilly’s raft of solar panels can also support the data centre’s full power requirements of 500KW and local wind power will be added in the near future. Its goal is to create a UK hub for AI and ML services that allows academia and enterprise to collaborate and share ideas.
Chris Roberts, head of data centre and cloud at Goonhilly Earth Station told Networking+ that the new commercial data centre is linked to the largest international fibre connections and its major satellite receiving station. “We also have a solar array sufficient to power the entire facility on site, with more renewable capacity in the works,” he added. “Our customers can drive innovation in AI, machine learning, and research while remaining completely carbon neutral – boosting their green-energy credentials at the same time.”
Goonhilly has also extended its AI capabilities by signing up to the NVIDIA Inception programme for businesses that are transforming industries through advancements in AI and data sciences. Goonhilly will use the NVIDIA DGX-1, the world’s first supercomputer purpose-built for enterprise AI and deep learning.
The tier 3/4 data centre sits at the junction of global subsea cables, satellite feeds and fibre, customers can analyse data at the edge. This eliminates the cost of a leased line to send huge data volumes back to London, or even farther afield, for processing.
Existing satellite customers are also expected to use the data centre. Previously, the data transmitted was solely small packets of communications signals, but today’s satellites are used for applications including 8K real-time imaging, which use petabytes of data. By analysing the data at the edge, a much smaller packet can then be cost-effectively distributed.
One of the first data centre customers is Milton Keynes based cloud-based analytics service providers Zizo, which has chosen to host its big data analytics as a service at Goonhilly.
“When looking at data centres to host our cloud-based service, only Goonhilly could address our critical issues such as availability, resilience and affordability but also offer the value-add of green energy and immersive cooling,” said Zizo’s chairman Peter Ruffley. “Customers are increasingly asking questions about the carbon footprint of compute power, which makes Goonhilly a great choice.”
