This may sound a little sad, but ever since we launched the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX, I’ve developed quite a fetish for server clusters based around the board – the more high density and massively parallel the better.

So it was a great pleasure to have Hanni Ali, Chief Executive Officer of UK start-up Ainkaboot talk about the new Octimod Cluster he has developed at the press briefing we held earlier today in London. With its 4U cabinet that is only 300mm deep, the Octimod accommodates up to 16 VIA EPIA EN Mini-ITX mainboards and is not only space saving but extremely energy efficient, with each module consuming less than 30 watts at full power and only one watt when idle. That means that a fully populated cabinet can deliver up 216GHz of processing power at below 4.3kW – less than 20 watts per GHz.

Last week, a report sponsored by AMD pointed out that the amount of electricity consumed by servers has doubled in the past five years and will increase a further 75 per cent by 2010; it also said that in 2005 the world’s servers and their cooling infrastructure consumed as much power as that put out by fourteen 1,000-megawatt power stations.

Clearly, power efficiency in the data center is set to become an even more serious issue, and it’s great to see creative entrepreneurs like Hanni utilize our platforms to develop innovative solutions to help resolve it.

For more information, please see the press release here.