II-NEW: GreenIT: Testbeds for Real-time Data Center and Platform Energy and Thermal Management

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

GreenIT: Testbeds for Real-time Data Center and Platform Energy and Thermal Management - CRI Proposal 0958514 The projected power demand for data centers and servers in the US is expected to grow to about 100B kWh by 2011, and even expected efficiency improvements projected by the EPA are insufficient to cap steady growth in IT energy demand. In order to reign in this growth, the 'GreenIT' cross-cutting and cross-disciplinary project seeks solutions that span multiple disciplines (mechanical, civil, electrical, and computer science) and multiple technologies (chips/packaging, operating systems/software, cooling technologies and thermal/fluid modeling, at multiple length and time scales). The project approach is measurement-based, establishing a 'GreenIT' testbed for energy efficient IT. The testbed will operate at `data center scale', because it is coupled with ongoing efforts at Georgia Tech that are providing us both with (1) a large-scale, commodity IT infrastructure, i.e., racks of machines and (2) new facilities used for a multi-site collaboration in cloud computing. Commodity equipment and instrumentation are housed in the CEETHERM lab, in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, which offers dynamically controllable air cooling capabilities. This permits joint control of cooling and IT power consumption. Additional researcher-accessible measurement stations target new facilities and next generation multicore platforms. A common thread in this research is its use and promotion of coordinated management 'across the energy stack', where management actions taken at different levels of the energy stack are performed in a coordinated manner. The outcome is holistic data center management for improved power efficiency.