Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LoCaCloud (Low Carbon Cloud)
Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-04-30
Qarnot is a cloud computing service provider that proposes a disruptive model in contrast to the traditional datacenter (DC) industry, where IT waste heat is a product generated and recovered where it is needed, transforming an IT industry waste product into an environmentally friendly heat service. To achieve this, Qarnot’s IT infrastructure is completely geographically distributed, installed and operated by the company. The DCs are installed on sites (France, Finland and Greece) where heating is a valuable product, to replace or supplement heating plants or heaters by feeding them with waste heat from the server.
For this purpose, Qarnot relies on proprietary innovative technological bricks:
- The QBx: a totally new and patented digital boiler (hardware) capable of recovering virtually all the heat emitted by servers (95%). The recovered energy is delivered as a low carbon heat up to 65°C as hot water,
- The Qware: a in-house middleware to orchestrate and distribute cloud services across Qarnot’s geographically distributed DC.
Our innovative infrastructure has been designed to drastically reduce energy consumption and lower associated carbon footprint. QBx are already installed to provide energy to heat networks, swimming pools, etc.
DC industry consumes 2-3% of the world's electricity today, with the prospect of 13% of the world's electricity by 2030. The main problem for AI development and DC is energy availability and not IT servers within the very next years. This is not sustainable for many reasons.
Qarnot’s solution changes the DC industry paradigm and is the only one to present the following environmental performance all year long:
- by reducing energy consumption since electrical energy is used twice: for calculation and for heating. Qarnot also saves air-conditioning energy to remove heat from conventional DCs (around 40% of total DC energy);
- by saving energy that would have been used to produce heat (often gas for heat networks or domestic hot water) ;
As a DC, our distributed cloud infrastructure guarantees high standards regarding IT performances, sovereignty, security and resilience. We reduce up to 80% carbon footprint compared to regular DC in Europe.
For this purpose, Qarnot relies on proprietary innovative technological bricks:
- The QBx: a totally new and patented digital boiler (hardware) capable of recovering virtually all the heat emitted by servers (95%). The recovered energy is delivered as a low carbon heat up to 65°C as hot water,
- The Qware: a in-house middleware to orchestrate and distribute cloud services across Qarnot’s geographically distributed DC.
Our innovative infrastructure has been designed to drastically reduce energy consumption and lower associated carbon footprint. QBx are already installed to provide energy to heat networks, swimming pools, etc.
DC industry consumes 2-3% of the world's electricity today, with the prospect of 13% of the world's electricity by 2030. The main problem for AI development and DC is energy availability and not IT servers within the very next years. This is not sustainable for many reasons.
Qarnot’s solution changes the DC industry paradigm and is the only one to present the following environmental performance all year long:
- by reducing energy consumption since electrical energy is used twice: for calculation and for heating. Qarnot also saves air-conditioning energy to remove heat from conventional DCs (around 40% of total DC energy);
- by saving energy that would have been used to produce heat (often gas for heat networks or domestic hot water) ;
As a DC, our distributed cloud infrastructure guarantees high standards regarding IT performances, sovereignty, security and resilience. We reduce up to 80% carbon footprint compared to regular DC in Europe.
The EIC LocaCloud project contains three technical and scientific work packages which are:
- WP3: Hardware and edge datacenter development,
- WP4: Orchestrator, software grid management development,
- WP5: Software, developing Qarnot's services portfolio
WP3 concerns our digital boiler QBx which has been designed to accommodate 12 OCP servers. We need to redesign a new heat recovery cold plate when moving to new servers. Last year, we have worked on 3 server integrations.We started to refine the boiler to ease manufacturing and lower production costs. We have developed benches for Qbx and electronic boards for manufacturing.
Aim of WP4 is to scale up Qarnot's middleware to handle additional orders of magnitude regarding cloud grid size (number of edge DC sites, of computing cores, of clients). At the same time, the goal is to set the right conditions for scale up: data management capabilities, monitoring and supervision and especially IT security. We increased the number of cores per pool of machines from 500 to 700, still with a reactive system and want to reach 1500 cores per pool within a year. We have worked on high availability and horizontal scalability with a complete refactor of our central scheduler changing our communication protocol to HTTP. Caching and storage are also a concern as our infrastructure must be efficient whilst geo-distributed. We imagined and tested several configurations, most of which were unsatisfactory (performance, security, etc). We have started to develop our own registry service for users so that they can manage all their data on Qarnot’s infrastructure. In parallel, we are working on monitoring and quality management, developing telemetry from core services to detect issues in the system early before business impact. This is crucial for the management of our geo-distributed datacenter. In addition, we continue to develop accuracy and usability of our carbon reporting tool.
WP5 concerns our software portfolio to widen our cloud services to enlarge the accessible markets. Scale-up implies more sites and more clients, and consequently more needs for connectivity:
- Ad-hoc experiments for direct connectivity and redundancy (direct interconnection between our computing nodes to customer internal storage services, redundancy of an interconnection with a client to access private cloud service through the client IT infrastructure),
- shaping future development toward VPN-based interconnection for small and medium customers.
Qarnot’s cloud services portfolio requests transverse technological components on which we worked this year:
- IaaS: a general driver in our developments
- Streamlining hardware mobility between cloud and bare metal
- RoCE, accelerate node communication
- Carbon Facts V2, environmental footprint data
- Bare-metal server energy consumption
We also worked on end-users software integration:
- 13 new softwares, 18 updates of past integrations to decrease support and automate new version integrations,
- on-going development of a plug-in directly integrated into the modelling software.
- WP3: Hardware and edge datacenter development,
- WP4: Orchestrator, software grid management development,
- WP5: Software, developing Qarnot's services portfolio
WP3 concerns our digital boiler QBx which has been designed to accommodate 12 OCP servers. We need to redesign a new heat recovery cold plate when moving to new servers. Last year, we have worked on 3 server integrations.We started to refine the boiler to ease manufacturing and lower production costs. We have developed benches for Qbx and electronic boards for manufacturing.
Aim of WP4 is to scale up Qarnot's middleware to handle additional orders of magnitude regarding cloud grid size (number of edge DC sites, of computing cores, of clients). At the same time, the goal is to set the right conditions for scale up: data management capabilities, monitoring and supervision and especially IT security. We increased the number of cores per pool of machines from 500 to 700, still with a reactive system and want to reach 1500 cores per pool within a year. We have worked on high availability and horizontal scalability with a complete refactor of our central scheduler changing our communication protocol to HTTP. Caching and storage are also a concern as our infrastructure must be efficient whilst geo-distributed. We imagined and tested several configurations, most of which were unsatisfactory (performance, security, etc). We have started to develop our own registry service for users so that they can manage all their data on Qarnot’s infrastructure. In parallel, we are working on monitoring and quality management, developing telemetry from core services to detect issues in the system early before business impact. This is crucial for the management of our geo-distributed datacenter. In addition, we continue to develop accuracy and usability of our carbon reporting tool.
WP5 concerns our software portfolio to widen our cloud services to enlarge the accessible markets. Scale-up implies more sites and more clients, and consequently more needs for connectivity:
- Ad-hoc experiments for direct connectivity and redundancy (direct interconnection between our computing nodes to customer internal storage services, redundancy of an interconnection with a client to access private cloud service through the client IT infrastructure),
- shaping future development toward VPN-based interconnection for small and medium customers.
Qarnot’s cloud services portfolio requests transverse technological components on which we worked this year:
- IaaS: a general driver in our developments
- Streamlining hardware mobility between cloud and bare metal
- RoCE, accelerate node communication
- Carbon Facts V2, environmental footprint data
- Bare-metal server energy consumption
We also worked on end-users software integration:
- 13 new softwares, 18 updates of past integrations to decrease support and automate new version integrations,
- on-going development of a plug-in directly integrated into the modelling software.
The aim is to bootstrap Qarnot's orientation toward larger edge DC, able to use directly heat produced by the servers for significant power / energy, between 200kW to 1MW typically. This strategy involves identifying and creating at least one real site to demonstrate the maturity and effectiveness of the Qarnot solution for these power levels.
WP2 concerns market activities oriented towards pre-commercial phases for demonstration installation. During the first year we defined an internal process and prepared tools to support commercial actions as technical simulations, detailed operational setups adapted to heat users, financial forecasts, heat applications collections, preliminary carbon footprint analysis. We also finalised an innovative heat sales model with the creation of an AssetCo. All this work led to several qualified contacts with heat potential sites. One 1,8 MW demo site was integrated in an Innovation Fund application in April 2024.
We have also begun the process of obtaining French SecNumCloud IT security certification.
WP2 concerns market activities oriented towards pre-commercial phases for demonstration installation. During the first year we defined an internal process and prepared tools to support commercial actions as technical simulations, detailed operational setups adapted to heat users, financial forecasts, heat applications collections, preliminary carbon footprint analysis. We also finalised an innovative heat sales model with the creation of an AssetCo. All this work led to several qualified contacts with heat potential sites. One 1,8 MW demo site was integrated in an Innovation Fund application in April 2024.
We have also begun the process of obtaining French SecNumCloud IT security certification.