Ecological and smart heat reuse is the theme for this week’s episode of Running on OCP. Qarnot, a French based enterprise, is fully committed to transitioning the environmental impact of IT through a distributed HPC heat reuse model.
I had the opportunity to speak with Paul Benoit, CEO and Co-Founder of Qarnot, along with the CTO, Clement Pellegrini. They share the background of how Qarnot began and interesting use cases for their solution. It’s a fantastic story of sustainability, heat reuse and use of open hardware for HPC.
Paul Benoit
Paul Benoit graduated from the French École polytechnique, started his career in 2000 as a technical director in a web agency. In 2002, he joined the R&D department of a major bank with one of the largest HPC infrastructures dedicated to risk analysis. In 2010, he founded Qarnot computing, providing its clients a unique solution to drastically reduce the carbon footprint linked to their digital activities. Qarnot distributes its computing infrastructure in non-datacenter buildings where huge amounts of heat generated by servers can be locally and directly valued. Today, the company has more than 70 employees.
Clément Pellegrini
Clément Pellegrini joined Qarnot's IT engineers team in 2014, after successful studies in Paris and a first work experience in Vancouver. Since 2017, as Qarnot's CTO, he is in charge of the development of both hardware and software solutions and oversees the technical strategy of Qarnot products. He leads a team of 40 engineers.