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The purpose of Cloudberry is to develop new knowledge about energy and resource-efficient data centers by conducting high-quality research. The overall goal is to generate research results and knowledge that help to streamline energy use in data centers, reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and contribute to a more efficient energy system as a whole.
Cloudberry is financed by The Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten) and Region Norrbotten.

Gender conference

When: 2 Dec. 2021, 09:00 - 12:00
Where: Online
This event is in swedish.

See the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b8Z9UM1HOc&t=235s

Gender equality culture as a competitive advantage - find, attract and retain talent.

Welcome to be inspired by Lindbäcks Bygg, Northvolt, Tromb, Volvo cars, TietoEVRY and more and hear how they work to find, attract and retain talent and what concrete tools they use to create a gendered corporate culture. During this digital half-day, you will find out how technology can contribute to increasing diversity, how educational efforts can break gender patterns and how the AI company Substorm has succeeded in achieving an even gender distribution. Other regional companies will also share their experiences, thoughts and ways of working.

Read more here

There will be a presentation of the halfway report, titled Electrical Models of Data Centers: Efficiency and Reliability Analysis. The report is part of the Cloudberry project.
Monday 30 November, 2020, 15:00, Zoom
Do you want to participate? Contact Math Bollen

Jil Sutaria will also have her halfway seminar and present her thesis Power quality in single-phase and three-phase installations with focus on supraharmonics next Thursday, December 3rd starting at 10:00, Zoom
Do you want to participate? Contact Sarah Rönnberg

The magazine Data Economy has appointed Top 30 thought leaders in edge computing for the august number.

Tor Björn Minde is on the list due to a number of initiatives by RISE. First RISE ICE Datacenter built a 5G edge testbed and received an Datacloud award for this. Secondly a number of research projects on the subject is started with partners. One is about autonomous edge datacenters. Lastly a new initiative is started to build a national 5G edge computing testbed.

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Day: Friday 15 May, 2020
Time: 10:00 - 15:10

Welcome to the second Cloudberry Day seminar within the Cloudberry Datacenters project.

Our PhD students will present their results so far and future work during 15 mins. presentations. A short Q&A session will follow after each presentation.

Due to the Coronavirus situation, we will perform the seminar fully digitized in Zoom this year:
https://ltu-se.zoom.us/my/bjobac
No registration is needed!

For more information, see pdf below.

Karl Andersson, Associate Professor and Executive Director at Luleå University of Technology and manager for Cloudberry Datacenters, has been interviewed in an article on green data centers.

Karl Andersson believes that the IT sector must take the energy issue more seriously. Knowledge is starting to spread in the industry, but it is a fairly new interest. He sees improvement of the software in the mobile apps and especially in the data centers as a next step, to create more energy efficient algorithms, that is to use another mathematical calculation method.

- There is a lot to do. All software distributed in the networks requires data capacity. The greater the amount, the more energy is required. Today we do not know how much data and energy from the networks that different apps require and what apps are running in the background of our mobile.

The world's data centers gives rise to greater carbon dioxide emissions than the aviation industry.

YouTube clips or streaming of a television series increase energy use, says Karl Andersson, assistant professor at Luleå University of Technology and project manager for the Cloudberry Datacenters research project.

To reverse this trend, the Swedish Energy Agency has launched the research project Cloudberry Datacenters.

- We are working on a number of interesting solutions, but it is too early to come out with any finished results, says Olov Schelén.

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Cloudberry Datacenters has conducted a lunch seminar on energy and resource efficient data centers at the Swedish Energy Agency in Eskilstuna.

At the seminar, an overview of the business as a whole was given by Michael Nilsson as well as a brief impact on the sub-projects by Karl Andersson. In addition, Marcus Sandberg presented the work in subproject two around innovative building solutions for the data center industry.

Olov Schelen also participated and gave the participants an insight into sub-projects 11 and 12 around the block chain as well as solutions for virtualization and orchestration.

After the seminar, several questions from the audience followed, among other things regarding future power needs, statistics, etc.

On november 4, Riccardo Lucchese at LTU defended his PhD thesis named Cooling control strategies in data centers for energy efficiency and heat recovery. The thesis has generated a great deal of interest.

Riccardo Lucchese says: "Environmental control in data centers presents a number of engineering challenges. The aim of the thesis has been to set some directions and move initial steps toward highly sustainable infrastructures. My hope is that this work can act as a seed to future research efforts and eventually grow into one of the core expertise of the automatic control group at Luleå University of Technology."

The thesis presents opportunities to simplify data center control structures while retaining or improving their performance. Furthermore, it lays modeling and control methodologies toward the holistic control-oriented treatment of the computing, cooling, and power distribution infrastructures. The results have a practical character and the model-based analysis establishes important development directions, confirming existing trends. Enabling intelligent data center management systems might not need to imply more complex tools, rather a co-design effort might yield both simpler and effective control systems.

Wolfgang Birk, Professor in Automatic Control, says: ”The result will enable more energy efficient data centers and waste heat recovery by applying modeling and control approaches. The study is highly relevant for district heating and cooling as well as renewable heating and cooling. It has generated more than 1000 views already. That is really great!”

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Two researchers from Luleå University of Technology, Marcus Sandberg and Agatino Rizzo and a coming Phd Student will explore the possibility of developing sustainable datacenters for a more attractive built environment.

The number of energy-intensive datacenters in Sweden and Europe are increasing and their impact on the local community need to be sustainable.

The idea is to look at solutions that have several functions: in addition to serving as datacenters, also serve as a source of renewable energy and also use the waste heat to grow food or heat a gym for example. Because low-value waste heat is difficult to transport, it is advisable to use it in proximity to the data center. Another challenge is to make the construction process more efficient and thus less costly.

The Multifunctional Datacenter Districts for Attractive Cities project is funded by the Energy Agency and Cooperative and run within the framework of the National Research Center Cloudberry Datacenters.

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Researchers at Luleå Univesity of Technology want to take advantage of the waste heat generated by many industries in a better way.

In a cold city like Luleå there are both heavy industries and large data centers that create large amounts of heat, which is apparent during the cold part of the year when steam rises to the sky.

"The purpose of this project is to find technical, economic and social synergies between greenhouse gases and data centers that can help make agriculture competitive and sustainable in the Nordic region", says Agatino Rizzo, Associate Professor in Urban Planning at Luleå University of Technology.

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On May 10th, an information meeting about the research centre Cloudberry Datacenters took place at Luleå University of Technology. During the meeting the research center as a whole as well as its different sub projects were presented.

The overall goal of Cloudberry Datacenters is to generate research results and knowledge that help to streamline energy use in data centers, reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and contribute to a more efficient energy system as a whole as well as to become a hub for research, development, knowledge and implementation in the data center area.
During the event, all of the 12 different sub-projects were presented, covering everything from energy systems, software, data clouds to research on buildings, cooling and energy recycling.

- Now when all the sub-projects has kicked off and are up-and-running, it is very interesting to hear everyone present their work and what is going on and how far they have come. We are very satisfied with the work so far says Karl Andersson, Associate Professor of Pervasive and Mobile Computing at Luleå University of Technology and project manager for Cloudberry Datacenters.

During the event, external guests as well as internal participants from Luleå University of Technology and RISE got a chance to network with one another and discuss issues like how a data center can be built differently in order to reduce energy consumption and what kind of software architecture is needed to increase energy efficiency.

Take the opportunity to learn more about tools and methods for practical gender mainstreaming.

The annual Gender Contact Point day will be held on March 13, 12-16 at Luleå University of Technology. Examples, tools and methods for practical gender mainstreaming are presented and discussed by companies, researchers and other participating actors. The day starts with a mingle lunch at 12. Cloudberry will also be there to tell you about the research center. See program below.
Please note that the last day of registration is 6/3.

Invitation with program and registration link

Data centres are a key part of the infrastructure that manages today's large amounts of data, and the growth is driven by the fact that people and devices are increasingly connecting to computer networks. A problem with data centres is that they are ineffective from an energy perspective, something that researchers hope to correct.

– The purpose of a light bulb is to generate light, however, the light is only one per cent of the energy consumption, and the remaining 99 per cent consists of heat. This has caused the bulb to become banned in Europe. Data centre is the 21st century light bulb, because only a small part of the energy is used to transport data, the rest of the energy used is made up of heat. Consequently, there is a great need to build more energy-efficient data centres, and I see it as a fluid mechanics challenge, says Jon Summers, research director at the RISE SICS North Institute and new adjunct professor of Fluid Mechanics at Luleå University of Technology.

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Cloudberry Datacenters are Luleå University of Technology's flagship project around energy and resource-efficient data centers implemented with RISE SICS North and the industry.

The research center is multidisciplinary and consists of 12 subprojects with research from everything from buildings and data center architecture to studies on data centers' impact on the energy system as a whole, efficient power and cooling systems for automation as well as IT related to data centers.

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LTU researchers will use virtual models to investigate the possibility of taking care of the waste heat from larger data centers.

The larger data halls are very energy-intensive and when the servers get hot they usually cool down with the help of air. It is then sent out through the ventilation pipes and into the empty air. According to LTU's measurements, the waste heat can be up to 35 degrees hot. It is not hot enough to transport the longer distances, so you explore various possibilities like growing food or heating buildings directly adjacent to the data halls. This is all done in a Research center called Cloudberry Datacenters.

Read more & watch the TV clip here

There is a regional data center project named
Green Power that will work to bring Northern Sweden on the map regarding research and innovation in green energy efficient data centers.

The project builds on the need to take care of waste heat from data centers. The goal is to develop a methodology to measure heat, humidity and airflow from datacenters and create computer models that can be used to design and evaluate greenhouse and energy transfer solutions and find a balance between waste heat and other energy sources for greenhouse operation in cold climates.

The project will contribute to new ideas and solutions in the field of data centers in a cold climate, combined with residual heat and work for long-term strategic international alliances.

An introduction day took place in Luleå and Boden for a group of newly arrived master students from the green IT program PERCCOM.

Sumeet Thombre is one of the PERCCOM students that will study at LTU during the coming year and do his master thesis at Skellefteå campus.
Sumeet says: "I thought the introduction day was very well organised by Professor Karl Andersson. It had top notch arrangements and a good confluence of educational, social and cultural activities. We had very good technical sessions including our thesis structuring and a visit to Hydro66, close to Boden. At Hydro66 we saw their new data center and got a good understanding of their research and deployment techniques. Actually, I was already aware of the fact that Luleå and Boden had data centers before coming there, because I read a detailed article about data centers and Facebook in the SAS flight magazine while flying to Stockholm."

Spread knowledge, raise the industry in the area of data center and cloud and to work more effectively towards greener data storage. That was the aim of the conference named "The data center and cloud Days" organized at Luleå University of Technology by Cloudberry and EIT ICT Labs.

More and more data are stored which in turn requires more energy. Finding ways to reduce energy consumption and thereby create a better life for both the environment and communications, are two major challenges for research and the industry, and two of the challenges that were addressed during the conference. During the conference at Luleå University of Technology, the approximately 80 participants got to listen to Frank Ketelaars from IBM, Azimeh Sefidcon, Ericsson, Andy Long, CEO of Boden's data center Hydro66 and Sam Cole, manager of the data center KNC Miner. The conference participants also got to visit a data center in Boden. The conference closed with a panel discussion which, among other things, discussed the issue of energy for data centers. "Hopefully, the energy tax should be the same throughout Europe. It would create a more fair competition", says Marie Nolin.

The opportunity for the industry to meet and interact is of great importance at a conference such as The data center and cloud days. Both to attract more data centers and innovative companies to the region and to bring about possible research collaborations. "The industry has a need for meeting places and one such is Cloudberry. There is also a need to raise and communicate important issues, such as how local businesses can become better providers of data center companies", says Marie Nolin. "Luleå University of Technology needs to expand its research in order to solve the challenges the industry is facing. But we also need to be in the forefront when it comes to education so that the region has skilled staff to put into this growing sector of the future."

Read more & see picture gallery here

iMasons Data Center Sustainability Framework

Currently, there is no standardized measure as to what constitutes a “sustainable data center”, nor is there a scale to measure a data center’s progress in achieving sustainability goals.

The iMasons Sustainability Committee has developed a Sustainability Data Center Framework which provides an industry best practice for building and running a sustainable data center. The Framework was developed based on input from members and leaders within the iMasons member community.

The Commission has published the results of a study for greener cloud services and data centres.
Now Moa Johansson and Ellinor Emilsson run an experimental cultivation of 30 square meters with the help of the waste heat from data servers. Results show that energy consumption of data centres in EU Member States is expected to increase from 2.7% of the electricity demand in 2018 to 3.2% by 2030. The study provides technical and policy options to limit this increase.

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The server halls in Luleå were Facebook's first with completely renewable energy.

The experiences from Luleå laid the foundation for Facebook's sustainability goals. That's what Facebook's sustainability manager Sylvia Lee said when she spoke at the Demo North Summit conference in Luleå.

- It became an important foundation for Facebook's sustainability goals. We are grateful for how well we have been received here in Luleå and we would like to learn from you in the sustainability work against climate change, Sylvia Lee said.

Swedish electricity use is expected to increase sharply by 2030.

Electricity use is expected to rise by between 16 and 23 TWH, but will increase very much in different parts of the country.
The Swedish Energy Agency estimates that electricity consumption will increase mainly as a result of increased electricity consumption in industry. Swedish industry is already highly dependent on electricity today. The increased use of electricity The Swedish Energy Agency points to can be attributed to a small number of new, very electricity-intensive projects. This includes SSAB's investment in fossil-free steel, HYRBIT, Cementa's investment in climate-neutral cement production at Gotland and Northvolt's new battery factory outside Skellefteå.

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A new study found that Facebook’s data centers provided significant contributions to the local economy.

Some of the study’s findings:

From 2011-2018, Facebook’s Luleå Data Center stimulated 21.8 billion SEK of combined direct, indirect, and induced sales activity in Sweden and drove 10.8 billion SEK of Swedish GDP.

The economic activity stimulated by Facebook’s Luleå Data Center ultimately drove 4.82 billion SEK of labour income and supported 1,461 jobs per year in Sweden.

For every 100 SEK Facebook’s Luleå Data Center spent in Sweden on construction and operations, 93 SEK of additional GDP was stimulated in the Swedish economy.

Read the article here
Read the full report below

As the world becomes increasingly digitalised, demand for data centre services is rising rapidly.

But huge strides in energy efficiency including a shift to efficient “hyperscale” data centres have helped to limit data centre electricity demand growth globally. At the local level, however, these large hyperscale data centres represent huge electricity demand loads, adding pressure to electricity grids and increasing the challenge of energy transitions, especially in smaller countries.

Boden Type DC was awarded Nonprofit Industry Initiative of the Year at DCD Awards 2019.

DCD Awards is the awards gala of Data Center Dynamics. The gala celebrates innovation and the pioneers of the data center industry. DCD describes the category Nonprofit Industry Initiative of the Year as an award “about recognizing the great initiatives to educate and influence the data center sector that NGOs, professional bodies and academia put together”.

The jury, consisting of a panel of independent data center experts, motivated their decision:
”Funded by the European Horizon 2020 project, this 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.”

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Foreign IT giants would like to establish data halls in Sweden, but the facilities consume a lot of energy and challenge the capacity shortage in the electricity networks. However, next year new energy requirements will start to apply, announces the Swedish Energy Agency.

Starting in March 2020, a new eco-design regulation will start to apply within the EU for servers and data storage products, which require reporting on energy use in both operation and standby, as well as in which conditions the services work most optimally.

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Read more about the EU requirements

Large amounts of energy goes to the fans that cool down the hard-working processors in today's data center. But by using natural draft, researchers hope to halve energy consumption.

The research institute Rise SICS North in Luleå is working on a possible solution in a project funded by the Swedish Energy Agency. In the simulations made before the experiment, researchers have found that the energy consumption of fans under optimal conditions can be halved.

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HIVE Blockchain will expand Cryptocurrency Mining Capacity by 175% with New Data Centre in Boden.

The new Data Centre will be a newly constructed GPU mining facility. The Company’s cryptocurrency mining capacity is expected to increase by approximately 175% with the addition of the new Data Centre. Harry Pokrandt, CEO and President of HIVE stated “HIVE is acquiring a facility in a politically stable country with access to excellent infrastructure and complements our existing facilities in Iceland.”

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The Data Center Eco-Sustainability Award
Winner: Hydro66
Hydro66 is led and financed by Internet industry veteran David Rowe, founder and CEO of Easynet. Its first data centre is located in the leading cloud and data center cluster in the Nordics and is powered using locally generated clean green hydropower

Best Data Center Initiative of the Year
Winner: RISE SICS North AB
RISE SICS is a leading research institute for applied information and communication technology in Sweden, founded in 1985. Its new ICE research data center supports universities and industrial companies with an experimental environment for cloud and infrastructure technology.

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U.S. Blockchain company The Future of Mining launches data center and business accelerator in Boden-Älvsbyn.

The Miami based Blockchain and High Performance Computing (HPC) company The Future Of Mining is setting up data center operations in Sweden. The deal includes a 1,500m2 brownfield data center facility as well as a large adjacent office facility. The plan is to also start a dedicated business accelerator – all located in the HPC cluster Boden-Älvsbyn the north of Sweden. The first 5 MW of capacity will be up and running already during November, with another 30 MW to follow over the coming 18 months.

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The Luxembourg-based company Etix Everywhere and Swedish Arctic Sites are launching a data center to open in Porjus Industrial House.

This will be a top-notch, high-quality facility that, together with 100 percent renewable energy and multiple fiber redundancy, will make the data center one of Sweden's most powerful colocation facilities. In the data center in Jokkmokk, customers are offered to place their own servers in the hall or a lease solution.

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The datacenter project named "FUI" provides an opportunity for small and medium-sized enterprises, with operations in Norrbotten and Västerbotten, to gain support for the development of products and services in the field of green resource-efficient data centers and clouds.

The purpose of the project is to promote the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises, in collaboration with universities, institutes and technical data center test environment. The project runs until the end of 2018.

Read more here

Mark Zuckerberg has written about their Luleå Datacenter in a Facebook post.

He writes: The small town of Luleå is less than 70 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and it's typically pretty cold. The temperature in the area is below 50 degrees most days, so we use large fans to pull in the outside air to naturally cool the thousands of warm servers that line the center’s broad hallways. A dozen hydro-electric plants operate on nearby rivers, providing a reliable and renewable power source. The whole system is 10% more efficient and uses almost 40% less power than traditional data centers. Inside, the main building is the size of six football fields. Nearly all the technology in the facility, from the servers to the power distribution systems, is based on Open Compute Project designs as well.

Read more here

To benefit even more from the Netherland's strong position in Digital Infrastructure and raise economic growth, a Deloitte report has made the following six recommendations:

1. Support investments and developments in the Digital Infrastructure sector. Barriers for investments and additional
national or European legislation have a negative impact on economic growth as the sector is a driver for the international
internet economy and the digital society.

2. Create incentive measures for the online ecosystem as a whole. Do not only look at the core Digital Infrastructure
sector, but also to the down- and upstream sectors as they
strengthen each other.

3. In particular, stimulate innovations that depend on the Dutch Digital Infrastructure. Chances for growth can be found in E-commerce, online services and by stimulating cloud innovations by Dutch firms.

4. Stimulate the choice of NL as a host nation for multinationals who offer digital services. In the wake of stiff
international competition and growing importance of
Digital Infrastructure for business operations, attracting
foreign firms who are heavy users of our digital facilities can contribute significantly to the growth of the Dutch online ecosystem.

5. Form regulatory frameworks which focuses on the broader picture. The size and growth of the Digital Infrastructure
and the Internet economy justifies its own frameworks,
avoiding unnecessary legislation.

6. Align education to ensure a workforce that meets the needs of the digital economy. The rate of change and growth of the digital economy and the impact on our society requires a proactive approach to teach digital skills in all aspects parts of the educational system.

Read the full report here

Cloudberry Datacenters

Cloudberry Datacenters - A Research Center

Cloudberry /LTU News

Cloudberry Datacenter's Final seminar

Welcome to Cloudberry Days 2022

Gender conference

On the cover of Resources

Cloudberry halfway seminars

Tor Björn Minde on the Top30 list of thought leaders in Edge Computing

Welcome to Cloudberry Day 2020

Data traffic must consume less energy

Data centers run the risk of becomingan environmental hazard

Welcome to Gender Contact Point Day 2020

Seminar on energy and resource efficient data centers at the Swedish Energy Agency

A PhD thesis that will enable more energy efficient data centers

Data centers in North Sweden

Multifunctional data centers

Greenhouse at data center

Cloudberry Day

Welcome to the annual Gender Contact Point day

Data centres are the light bulb of the 21st century

Kick-off for Cloudberry Research Center

Data centers can increase food production

Huawei interested in data centers and research in Norrbotten

Spill heat from server halls - to grow vegetables

Data centers in North Sweden

Research project in the area of waste heat

Student visit at the Facebook Data Center

Data Centers in North Sweden

Master students in Green IT visits data center

Report from the Data center & Cloud Days

Data Center News

Growing vegetables with heat from server halls in Luleå

iMasons Data Center Sustainability Framework

Options to limit surge in energy consumption for cloud and data centres

Not 'pure idiocy' to build a data center

Why is data center crucial for Sweden?

Luleå laid the foundation for Facebook's sustainability goals

More electricity is needed in the future

Facebook Luleå Data contributes to the local economy driving 11 billion SEKof Swedish GDP

Data centres and energy – from global headlines to local headaches?

Boden Type DC awarded Nonprofit Industry Initiative of the Year

New energy requirements on data halls

Everyone wants to build data centers in Sweden

Investments in data centers will double by 2025

Heat from server halls - to grow vegetables

Experiment to halve energy consumption in Data centers

New Data Centre in Boden

Sweden #1 in Country Sustainability Ranking

Hydro66 & RISE SICS North winners of Datacenter Dynamics Awards

New 35MW cryptocurrency mine

Boden sells land to data center

New data center to the HPC cluster

The Swedish data center industry is booming

Jokkmokk's new data centeris being launched

How Sweden plans to be Europe’s data centre powerhouse

SME support for the development of products and services

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook post about the Luleå Datacenter

Digital Infrastructure report

Data centers run the risk of becoming
an environmental hazard

Facebook Luleå Data contributes to the local economy driving 11 billion SEK
of Swedish GDP

Jokkmokk's new data center
is being launched