Computer Architecture developed for Speed and Power

Micorsoft Research has another project which can change the data center, and make in Greener.  The following are excerpts from their post.  Chuck Thacker is the architect behind the project and as an experienced computer architect who gets how power is an issue in computer architectures and data centers. Chuck is one of the Microsoft Research people who has an interest in what is going on in Microsoft data centers.

Indeed, speed and power are the two attributes Thacker hopes the BEE3 system can help address.

“One of the big problems that we face as a company is that it’s become increasingly clear that processors aren’t going to get faster,” he says. “They dissipate too much power now, and it’s a real challenge to get rid of it. We want to look at some of these new architectures as possibilities for solving those two problems, the speed problem and the power problem.”

And, his colleague John Davis is working on the instrumentation for the system. 

“One of the nice things about these systems is that they can be very intricately instrumented, so we can get a lot of data.”

“They designed the case of the system,” Thacker says. “They designed the heat sinks for the FPGAs and did all the computational fluid-dynamic modeling to make sure that it would all work. That is one of the largest mistakes you can make in designing a computer system, to get the thermal properties wrong, because then it overheats and doesn’t work. Function was enormously helpful in this area.”

A dream scenario is these guys leave the option to have instrumentation embedded in the design if they go to production.

Another way to solve the power utilization issue is to build custom computers.

The viability of the FPGA approach was demonstrated last summer, when Zhangxi Tan, then an intern at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, built a system for solving the problem of binary satisfiability, commonly used in design automation.

“He got speed of about 40 times what a computer could do,” Thacker reports, “because the algorithm is exactly suited for what can be done in FPGAs.”

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Microsoft Demos Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning at TechFest

Microsoft Research has a post about one of their Green projects at their TechFest event.  If you are not familiar with Techfest here is a google news search and the Microsoft website.

Auto Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning

Green, as we now know, is, indisputedly, the new black. Seems like you can't turn on the television or pick up a newspaper to read about the latest green initiative. Lots of people are talking.

Feng Zhao is doing something about it.

Zhao's Networked Embedded Computing group is showing a TechFest demo called Auto-Shift: Energy-Aware Server Provisioning, which addresses server resource management for Internet services, such as Live Messenger and Hotmail. Data centers for such services require potentially expensive decisions about how many computers to allocate and how those are deployed.

"No. 1," Zhao says, "you have to buy the servers. No. 2, once you buy a server, you have to manage it. And third, you have to have an infrastructure, such as power supply. In this particular study, we looked at the power usage of the servers that are running one of our largest Web services. If you look at the load as it varies over the course of the day, it peaks around noon and slows down around midnight. That clearly shows that not all the servers are needed all the time. Can we shut down some of the servers? Can we actually save energy?"

This demo is the same paper I referred to earlier in another post.

The blog entry continues with the following points made by Feng.

"We also have all these sensors in the data centers," Zhao says. "Some of the machines work harder than others. If we can move the workload around, from hotspots to cool spots, the air conditioning doesn’t have to work as hard, because of the efficiency of cooling the hottest spots. If you move that workload and even out the temperature disparities, that means good energy savings. Incorporating environmental-sensor readings such as temperature and humidity, and couple that with smart scheduling and workload migration, and we believe we can even save more resources."

That sounds green, indeed--and economical, too. 

"What it translates to," Zhao concludes, "is that you use less power and that, with these smarts, we can figure out that maybe we don’t need to buy that many machines to start with, because we can do the same work, with very little difference in performance, and actually run it on a smaller set of machines. Reduce energy cost and reduce hardware investment in the first place--that would reduce service cost, reduce staffing, and reduce the space you need to build."

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Microsoft Releases a Set of Best Practices for Energy Efficient Data Centers

Infoworld writes on Microsoft's release of a set of best practices for Energy Efficiency Data Centers.

Microsoft will release a set of best practices for administrators running datacenters, focusing on energy-saving strategies the company is implementing in its own operations, CEO Steve Ballmer said Monday.

Those tips will covers issues such as how to pick a good site for a datacenter, how to deal with heat, and how to manage power consumption, Ballmer said during a keynote presentation at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.

The move is in response to growing concern over the release of carbon dioxide, one of the byproducts of burning fossil fuels to create electricity. In addition, power demands are ever-increasing, Ballmer said.

"If you look at non-travel power consumption in the world today ... information technology is one of the most rapidly growing power consumers on the planet," Ballmer said. "We think we have a real responsibility ... to reduce power consumption by the IT industry."

The paper can be found at this location.

Let's see if we other big datacenter operators will follow Microsoft. 

Google?

Yahoo?

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Greening the Branch Office with Windows Server 2008

Microsoft is launching Windows Server 2008 today, and one of the features which will get little press coverage is Windows Server 2008's Branch Office features and how they can help Green the Branch offices by reducing the hardware required in the branch office, and leverage central resources more efficiently.

With features such as Read-Only Domain Controller, BitLocker Drive Encryption, Server Core, and network protocol improvements, Windows Server 2008 is a great platform for the branch office. And now, through a virtualization component that Cisco will be embedding in their WAAS appliances, Cisco will offer Windows Server 2008 as part of their WAN optimization solution.  This means that IT can offer all of the performance and availability benefits of having base IT services in the branch office without the need for extra hardware. In fact, deployment is all centrally managed, entirely through software!

And Cisco is one of the partners in the Branch Office solution.

Cisco WAAS:

Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a WAN optimization solution that improves the performance of TCP-based applications operating in a WAN environment. The basic idea is to accelerate access to servers and applications that have been centralized into corporate data centers. This provides LAN-like application performance for branch office users while taking advantage of the IT infrastructure simplification that comes from centralization.

This certainly sounds like a win-win situation for customers, but we need to look a little deeper to understand why Cisco and Microsoft decided this was the next major area of collaboration for our companies.

Base IT Services:

When you centralize servers you quickly find out that there are some critical services that branch users and IT pros alike depend on. There are services like DHCP and DNS, that are required for just about everything, and then there is the “little” matter of managing printers, print queues and print driver distribution in the branch. And finally, users need to authenticate, process login scripts, and apply appropriate policies to connect to corporate resources – most often through Microsoft Active Directory®.

All of this infrastructure is provided by Windows Server for many Microsoft and Cisco customers. Customers have been talking with us about continuing to provide these services in the branch – even if they want to centralize everything else – and eliminate the need to deploy multiple physical devices into each branch office.

Cisco has their blog entry.

What makes that so interesting to our customers?

Several things:

1) The ability to flexibly design branch office IT architectures to meet information and business requirements, while actively lowering management cycles and cost.

2) Reducing IT devices in the branch, while still delivering required end user experience and local services (can you say print server, DNS, DHCP?)

3) Leveraging the network, and the benefits of WAN optimization (Cisco WAAS) coupled with virtualization, to enable the ideal mix of local branch and centralized data center services. Selectable by the customer.

I've tried to get the attention of some people on this subject, but Branch Offices tend to be much lower priority for the data center staff. I'll place bets almost no one thinks of their branch office in their Green Data Center strategy.

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