Crystal Group, a renowned designer and manufacturer of rugged computer and electronic hardware, has announced the delivery of the first GPU-accelerated substation servers for the utilities sector. Now, energy businesses can adopt and deploy AI technologies across their substations thanks to the combination of the precision and power of NVIDIA RTX GPUs in the Crystal Group Energy Series (ES).
Lindsay Palma, business development manager at Crystal Group, said, “With more than 55,000 substations in the U.S. to upgrade and modernize, Crystal Group is developing scalable, multi-faceted solutions to enable a more resilient, reliable, and secure smart grid. Adding the versatility and value of AI into their transformation efforts now equips them to meet today’s immediate needs with the flexibility to accommodate future demands.”
A utility’s substation network gains new AI capabilities by combining Crystal Group’s hyperconverged, virtualization-enabled substation servers with NVIDIA RTXTM A5000 GPUs.
- At least ten simultaneous 4K streams are processed in real-time.
- Inference capabilities for enhanced security monitoring
- Predictive analytics for substations
- Hypervisor failover capability with substation health monitoring
- Hardware that is software agnostic and tailored for the power industry’s stringent needs
IEC 61850-3 certified, Crystal Group ES servers and embedded computers feature industrial design standards for intelligent virtualization platforms. The ES range features a sturdy chassis designed and proven to endure the harsh circumstances seen in remote areas, including severe temperatures, changing weather conditions, moisture and dust, as well as electromagnetic interference and power transients.
Marc Spieler, head of Global Energy Business Development at NVIDIA, commented, “As utilities add more distributed resources to the grid, and as complexity increases at the substation, engineers are going to need high-performance, edge compute solutions with GPU-level processing speed and accuracy to unlock real-time optimizations at the substation. Integrating NVIDIA GPUs with Crystal Group ES servers provides utilities with the optimal AI platform to protect, manage and secure remote substation installations.”