Go Virtual on Iceland

Following the general trend to “Green IT”, the usage of renewable energy and at the same time facing the pressure of shorter and shorter design cycles Volkswagen decided to increase the investment into HPC based development resources and put a major portion of that onto Iceland. For us in Go Virtual Germany that meant to learn about projects on an island that is not member of the EU including all customs-related or logistic  issue we were not used to. After a first project realized in June 2016 we almost felt as “experts” for cases like this and the even larger project for early 2017 was close to routine.

Volkswagen did chose Verne Global as the local co-location partner. ( https://verneglobal.com/blog/volkswagen-innovates-manufacturing-with-move-to-verne-global) Currently they own space and power to install HPC resources on Iceland up to more than 1 MW of power consumption. End of February 5 HPC systems will be productive, which leaves still headroom for more compute power at that site.

Volkswagen runs of course also HPC systems in their headquarter in Wolfsburg. Go Virtual is a HPC supplier to Volkswagen since 2013. In Wolfsburg they use three Go Virtual HPC systems, the newest one was just installed in December 2016.