Projekt

Lead
Lay summary
The Datacenter Observatory is an experimental research facility for cloud computing research. While relatively small on the scale of industrial datacenters, the system nonetheless allows cloud computing experiments on a scale that is relatively unique in the academic world and that is relevant to industrial practice. It contains 7 racks hosting 178 2-processor servers with 8-core processors, for a total of 2848 processing cores. The system further contains 22.3TB of memory, 408TB of local disk storage (composed of 52TB SSD and 356TB SATA disks), and a storage array of 72TB of disks, for an aggregate of around 0.5PB of storage. The various components will be connected by two 96-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet network switches. For various reasons, including economies of scale, datacenters in current use are very large, and this will continue and even increase to be the case. Many of the interesting research problems are therefore concerned with scalability: how to build the systems that can scale to this size of installation. Very few academic researchers have access to this kind of facility. Many researchers use smaller clusters in their labs, and these can serve as prototyping facilities, but they need access to a large datacenter for experimentation and measurement. They cannot use commercially available cloud computing services or datacenters, because they want to experiment with the hardware, the network, the operating system, and all other levels of the software stack. They could not possibly hope to do experimentation at such low levels of the system without upsetting production use.

Direktlink auf Lay Summary

Letzte Aktualisierung: 21.02.2013

Titel	Jahr

Nummer	Titel	Start	Förderungsinstrument

Information technology is undergoing a major paradigm shift. In the future, most or all information will be housed in datacenters, and no longer in user’s desktops or corporate servers. Computing will be co-located with information. High-performance low-latency networks will make this information and computation available to end users, anytime anywhere. Users will access this information through a variety of devices, mostly mobile ones, with powerful display capabilities and high-bandwidth, low-latency network access. This vision of the future, called “cloud computing”, will lead to tremendous efficiency gains. Gone will be the need for large, energy-hungry in-house computing and storage facilities with armies of system administrators. All this functionality will be transparently provided by the cloud, leaving the end users to concentrate on their core business. All PIs in this proposal are active in cloud computing research. For our research to be competitive and for our results to be influential in industry we need access to a datacenter of on the order of a few thousand processors and a petabyte of storage. For various reasons, including economies of scale, datacenters in current use are very large, and this will continue and even increase to be the case. Many of the interesting research problems are therefore concerned with scalability: how to build the systems that can scale to this size of installation. Currently, very few academic researchers and none of us have access to this kind of facility. Many of us use smaller clusters in our labs, and these can serve as prototyping facilities, but we need access to a large datacenter for experimentation and measurement. Individually, we could not justify such a facility for our research groups, but collectively we can make extremely good use of a datacenter of this scale. We cannot use commercially available cloud computing services or datacenters. We want to experiment with the hardware, the network, the operating system, and all other levels of the software stack. We could not possibly hope to do experimentation at such low levels of the system without upsetting production use. We propose to acquire 8 racks hosting 180 2-processor servers with 4-core processors, for a total of 1440 processing cores. The system further contains 2.1TB of memory, 180TB of local disk storage, a storage array of 368TB of disks, and 800GB of FLASH for an aggregate of over 0.5PB of storage. The various components will be connected by eight 48-port network switches. The ratio of processing to memory and storage capacity - one core to 1.5GB of memory and 300GB of disk - is representative of existing enterprise datacenter installations and strikes a balance between speed, capacity and power. While relatively small on the scale of industrial datacenters, the system will nonetheless allow us to carry out cloud computing experiments on a scale that is relevant to industrial practice. The equipment will support our research programs in energy-efficient computing, storage and enterprise systems, networks, fault tolerance, program instrumentation, and testing.