Pilot site at Research Institutes of Sweden – Sweden

RISE ICE Test and Demo Facility in Luleå, Sweden, is located within a commercial building, housing various tenants and operations, including data centre operations. Since the building is located in an Arctic climate, with a yearly average temperature of around 3°C, it has a year-round heating demand.
The pilot site, RISE ICE Test and Demo facility, occupies approximately 983 m² (8% of the building’s total area) and operates within an aging infrastructure connected to the district heating network. With an annual heating demand of approximately 1.37 GWh for the full building, the pilot’s expected IT load of around 10 kW accounts for roughly 7% of this demand.
The pilot is designed to emulate realistic and heterogeneous IT clusters using real IT equipment and thermal test vehicles (TTVs), supporting the development of energy-aware workload orchestration.

 

 

The main goal is to validate HEATWISE’s hybrid cooling approach in a setting with varying chip thermal design powers, while reducing PUE, maximizing Energy Reuse Factor (ERF), and demonstrating heat recovery from air-cooled components using air immersion layers.

Key Features:

• Modular micro data center with max IT load of 13 kW (5 kW blade servers + 8 kW TTVs)
• ZutaCore’s Heat Recovery Unit, HRU, using two-phase direct liquid cooling for CPUs
• Multi-mode operation: Heat Reuse Mode, Auxiliary Cooling Mode, and Independent Cooling Mode
• Speed-controlled dry coolers, circulation pumps, and automated valves for precise thermal control
• Sensor network logging electricity, temperature, pressure, and flow across components
• Flexible control logic to simulate seasonal temperature variation and test edge-case scenarios

This pilot is instrumental in demonstrating scalable, real-world integration of IT and building infrastructure, targeting zero-waste energy systems and enabling advanced thermal management in cold climate data centers.