Japan has selected six companies to help power new research into green data centre technology.
The country’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO) has so far selected Fujitsu, NEC, AIO Core, Kioxia, Fujitsu Optical Components, and Kyocera to take part in the project, Fujitsu revealed today.
The project aims to address the challenge of increasing power consumption at data centres in today’s digital society. The companies taking part will work to develop innovative solutions to realise greater energy efficiency, larger capacity, and lower latency across data centres sites, ultimately contributing to net zero targets.
One of NEDO’s objectives is to achieve energy savings of 40% or more in domestic data centres by 2030, largely driven by growing energy demands across the sector.
The companies have been tasked with developing different technologies during the project:
Fujitsu: Low-power consumption CPUs and photonics smart network interface cards (NIC)
NEC: Low-power consumption accelerators and disaggregation technologies
AIO Core: Photoelectric fusion devices
Kioxia: Wideband SSD
Fujitsu Optical Components: Photonics smart NIC
Kyocera: Photonics smart NIC
Fujitsu said it will refine its microarchitecture technology, used in the supercomputer Fugaku, to develop a low-power consumption processing chip suited to data centre use. It will also work with its subsidiary Fujitsu Optical Components to develop a photonics smart network interface card (NIC) that reduces current network power consumption by applying optical transmission technology.
It hopes this will achieve greater efficiency in size and energy consumption, as well as greater data capacity, by refining software and hardware technologies.
"Fujitsu will harness this technology to deliver robust, yet environmentally-sustainable digital infrastructure that takes full advantage of Fujitsu's strengths in areas like computing and network technologies,” said Vivek Mahajan, corporate executive officer and CTO at Fujitsu.
“I am confident that our work on this initiative will help demonstrate Japan's technological capabilities, and show how Fujitsu can lead the way globally in innovation that contributes to the realisation of a carbon-neutral and sustainable society."
