Oct '08, Same Month for Microsoft's Container Data Center and PDC, Convenient Timing?

Franklin Park Herald of Northlake has an article about Microsoft's Container Data Center being completed in first half of October.

Microsoft building slated for fall completion

July 23, 2008

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By MARK LAWTON mlawton@pioneerlocal.com

Construction on Microsoft's data center in Northlake is on schedule to tentatively be finished in the first half of October.

The 550,000-square-foot building at 601 Northwest Avenue will house thousands of servers used to control Microsoft's online services.

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The Microsoft data center in Northlake will contain equipment that supplies power, water and networking capabilities.

The outer shell of the building is complete. A "significant portion" of the building electrical and mechanical work has also been completed, said Mike Manos, general manager of data center services.

The building will be a "container data center" and constructed in a manner that resembles an erector set or Lego toys.

"Literally, a truck will put up with a container on its back," Manos said. "The container has the computer equipment and cooling and electrical systems. It plugs into what we refer to as the spine, which gives it power and water (for cooling the equipment) and networking capabilities. Then the truck pulls away."

When the electrical and mechanical work is done, Microsoft will start the commissioning process. That's when they start testing out all the computer network servers -- "tens to hundreds of thousands," Manos said.

That process will take one to two months. Then the center will start being used.

Microsoft's PDC (professional developer conference) is scheduled for Oct 28 -30 where we will see if rumors of Microsoft's cloud services are true.

Microsoft Mum On 'Red Dog' Cloud Computing

The Windows-compatible platform can be seen as Microsoft's counterpart Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service, known as EC2, and to the Google App Engine.

By Richard Martin
InformationWeek
July 23, 2008 12:00 PM

Attempting to respond to cloud computing initiatives from Google and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is apparently in the process of preparing a cloud-based platform for Windows that is codenamed "Red Dog."

Though reports of the project have been circulating in the blogosphere for months, Microsoft has not publicly described the service. Microsoft did not respond to repeated requests for comments for this story.

Providing developers with flexible, pay-as-you-go storage and hosting resources on Microsoft infrastructure, Red Dog can be seen as Microsoft's counterpart Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service, known as EC2, and to the Google App Engine, according to Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist for Toronto-based Enomaly, which offers its own open-source cloud platform.

"It seems that Microsoft is working on a project codenamed 'Red Dog' which is said to be an 'EC2 for Windows' cloud offering," Cohen wrote on his blog, Elastic Vapor, last week. "The details are sketchy, but the word on the street is that it will launch in October during Microsoft's PDC2008 developers conference in Los Angeles."

Convenient Timing?  Or planned execution?

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Little Green Server Ideas Starting

ExtremeTech has an article building an Intel Atom based PC.

Intel's Atom has generated a lot of attention. Some of that attention has been positive: Intel building an x86 CPU whose primary design goal is very low power usage while maintaining good performance. On the other hand, Atom has been criticized for given up some key performance features, such as speculative, out-of-order execution.

Still, Atom has garnered some interesting design wins, including appearing in some of the tiny laptops first pioneered by the ASUS EeePC. Atom's most recent appearance has been in MSI's latest sub-laptop, the Wind.

What about Atom on the desktop?

First, you might ask why you'd want Atom in a desktop configuration. Its very nature suggests that performance would be limited. At 1.6GHz, and lacking out-of-order execution, performance might be pretty low. Other aspects of Atom, such as simultaneous multithreading (Hyper Threading) and a fast SSE2 floating point unit, might mitigate some of that.

in their conclusion, they get to some of the ideas for a Little Green Server.

In the end, a PC built around an Intel D945GCLF makes for a fine, light duty Web-oriented PC. It could even serve as a light duty home server, with the right storage gear. It is not, however, well-suited for even casual gaming, and we'd hesitate to run a full-bore office suite on it. Still, at 46W running flat out, it won't break your power budget.

Intel is really just dipping its toes into this market. We'd love to see more home-server oriented boards, with onboard RAID and no parallel ATA ports, for example. The system is also pretty noisy; the tiny CPU cooler isn't exactly quiet. Still, the D945GCLF will make an interesting test bed for anyone wanting to explore Atom's capabilities.

Another interesting review is from AnandTech and Asus's EEE Box.

Tom's Hardware has a review of the Intel Atom chip.

Intel is rumored to be  releasing dual core Intel Atom's in Q4 '08.

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$2,600,000 UC San Diego Energy Efficient Computing project, Heavily Instrumentation & Monitoring to Calculate Performance/Watt

UC San Diego has an article about their new Energy Efficient Computing project, GreenLight.

UC San Diego’s GreenLight Project to Improve Energy Efficiency of Computing

July 28, 2008

By Doug Ramsey

The information technology industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon “footprint” as the airline industry. Now scientists and engineers at the University of California, San Diego are building an instrument to test the energy efficiency of computing systems under real-world conditions – with the ultimate goal of getting computer designers and users in the scientific community to re-think the way they do their jobs.

This Sun Modular Datacenter deployed on the UC San Diego campus will be instrumented for the GreenLight project to offer full-scale processing and storage in order to test how to make computing more energy-efficient.

The National Science Foundation will provide $2 million over three years from its Major Research Instrumentation program for UC San Diego’s GreenLight project. An additional $600,000 in matching funds will come from the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the university’s Administrative Computing and Telecommunications (ACT) group.

The GreenLight project gets its name from its plan to connect scientists and their labs to more energy-efficient ‘green’ computer processing and storage systems using photonics – light over optical fiber.

The goal of GreenLight is to under computational performance per watt.

The GreenLight Instrument will enable an experienced team of computer-science researchers to make deep and quantitative explorations in advanced computer technologies, including graphics processors, solid-state disks, photonic networking, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Jacobs School of Engineering computer science professor Rajesh Gupta and his team will explore alternative computing fabrics from array processors to custom FPGAs and their respective models of computation to devise architectural strategies for efficient computing systems.

“Computing today is characterized by a very large variation in the amount of effective work delivered per watt, depending upon the choice of the architecture and organization of functional blocks,” said Gupta. “The project seeks to discover fundamental limits of computing efficiency and device organizing principles that will enable future system builders to architect machines that are orders-of-magnitude more efficient modern-day machines, from embedded systems to high-performance supercomputers.”

The computing and systems research will yield new quantitative data to support engineering judgments on comparative “computational work per watt” across full-scale applications running on full-scale computing platforms.

This is a big win for Sun Microsystems and their containers.

“Using the Sun Modular Datacenter as a core technology and making all measurements  available as open data will form a unique, Internet-accessible resource that will have a dramatic impact on academic, government and private-sector computing,” said Emil J. Sarpa, Director of External Research at Sun Microsystems, Inc. “By placing experimental hardware configurations alongside traditional rack-mounted servers and then running a variety of computational loads on this infrastructure, GreenLight will enable a new level of insight and inference about real power consumption and energy savings.”

According to DeFanti, the project decided to build the GreenLight Instrument around the Sun Modular Datacenter because, “it’s the fastest way to construct a controlled experimental facility for energy research purposes.” The modular structure also means the GreenLight Instrument can be cloned – unlike bricks-and-mortar computer rooms that cannot be ordered through purchasing.

Interior of the Sun Modular Datacenter prior to deployment of up to 280 servers and other equipment that will turn the shipping container into the GreenLight Instrument.

And to make things a bit sexy, they plan on using a virtual environment to visualize inside the containers..

Rather than give scientists physical access to the GreenLight Instrument, OptIPortal tiled display systems will serve as visual termination points – allowing researchers to “see” inside the instrument. Users will also be able to query and visualize all sensor data in real time and correlate it interactively and collaboratively in this immersive, multi-user environment.

Once a virtual environment of the system has been created, scientists will be able to walk into a 360-degree virtual reality version in Calit2’s StarCAVE. Users will be able to zoom into the racks of clusters as well as see and hear the power and heat, from whole clusters of computers down to the smallest instrumented components, such as computer processing and graphics processing chips.

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85% of Army's Diesel used to Cool the Troops and Computers

WSJ's environmental blog has a post about the US Army Green efforts.  In it they mention 85% of Army's diesel is used to provide cooling for

the troops and  computer equipment.

About 85% of the diesel hauled up to forward areas goes straight into air-conditioning, both for tired soldiers and to keep communications equipment cool. That means more, larger, and more vulnerable supply lines targeted by insurgents. Just spraying foam insulation on Army tents cut energy loss by 45%, Reuters reports.

And just as Baghdad is installing solar-powered streelights to improve security, clean energy could mean immediate security for American troops, and not just eventual energy independence for the American people:

“If we can reduce consumption on our forward operating bases by using renewable energy, let’s say wind or solar instead of a diesel generator outside the tent … then we can reduce the number of these supply convoys that need to come forward that are getting hit by these IEDs,” [said the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for environment, safety, and occupational health Tad] Davis.

The Pentagon is among the country’s biggest users of electricity and transport fuels, and the run-up in oil prices has led to a four-fold increase in the Pentagon’s gas bill since the Iraq war started. Most of its environmental initiatives so far have been like those of any other big, multinational firm—simple measures that reduce energy use and save money, and thus free up resources for other uses.

And even the Army is thinking Green.

Army Green: U.S. Military Gunning to Curb Carbon ‘Bootprint’

Posted by Keith Johnson

Expensive supply lines (AP)

The U.S. military has been trying to green up its operations in response to skyrocketing energy bills, toying with everything from biofuel for Air Force planes to solar panels at air bases.
On the ground, the lean green fighting machine is now trying to live up to all its name implies—and save lives in the process.

Reuters reports on the U.S. Army’s latest initiative to cut its own greenhouse-gas emissions by 30% in 2015—its carbon “bootprint.” One of the biggest opportunities? Slimming down the massive and vulnerable supply convoys carrying fuel for the mobile and energy-hungry U.S. forces operating in forward areas of Afghanistan and Iraq.

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Sun's CIO writes Forbes Commentary, provides Green Data Center ideas

Forbes has a commentary by Sun's CIO, Bob Worrall.

Commentary
A Green Budget Line
Bob Worrall 07.28.08, 6:00 AM ET

Bob Worrall

While the headlines are focused on nearly $5 gas and its impact on consumers, skyrocketing energy prices also are biting into information technology organizations as the costs of powering and cooling data centers reach all-time highs. In many companies, the cost to run data centers is now the second-largest expense after people. And the cost of powering data centers worldwide could grow from $18.5 billion in 2005 to $250 billion by 2012. There is no better time than right now to focus investment on more energy-efficient data centers.

Making the data center greener has been a hard sell. Most decision makers find the goal of reducing carbon emissions laudable but are held back by concerns that it will cut into profits or performance. When energy costs were relatively low, arguing that a current investment would reduce future costs was an uphill battle. But today's environment might provide the harsh dollars-and-cents context that's needed to move this issue from a decision about being green to one about being fiscally responsible.

Bob makes good tips in the rest of the article.

Check the vintage of the systems in your server racks, and replace energy and space hogs. Unlike fine wine, computer hardware rarely ages gracefully. Rooting out old systems is often the easiest way to make a data center more efficient. Old hardware almost always consumes more space and power than new systems. Older systems are also usually more difficult to cool efficiently. Switching to more modern systems often allows for impressive consolidation ratios ranging from 2:1 to 10:1. You gain space and save energy even as you increase your computing power.

Tie IT decision makers to their facilities counterparts. Regardless of how much electricity is being consumed by the data center, chief information officers aren't usually the ones writing the utility checks. This disconnect often fuels an unnecessary debate about the importance of compute power over cost savings. IT and facilities organizations need to collaborate to make sure both understand how energy-efficient computing will help address both. If you take the improved energy efficiency, the reduced space utilization and the rebates on servers offered by many municipal power providers, the cost to go green begins to approach negligible.

Look at virtualization and container technologies. Using the right container technologies as part of your virtualization approach isolates applications and services by using flexible, software-defined boundaries. Taking this direction can allow you to achieve even greater compression in both servers and storage. For example, one customer I worked with implemented a new storage system with built-in virtualization and eliminated 40 terabytes of physical capacity, reducing storage power and cooling costs by 60%.

Turn on the meter at the rack level. Legacy measurement of watts per square foot in a data center may show the room is running fine on average, but in reality you have hot spots throughout that are damaging equipment. Most data centers measure load at the perimeter of the data center, which predictably makes things unpredictable. It is important to take metering one step further. It needs to be measured at the rack level (watts per rack) to truly enable energy efficiency. This enables you to reduce power consumption by pinpointing attention on certain areas in a data center instead of using the traditional, scattershot approach of cranking up the fans when a particular area in the data center starts to run hot.

Note: Container Technologies mentioned are the type in this Sun White Paper for software containers, not the containers for data center equipment.

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