During the last decade fast development of compute-demanding applications such as Internet of Things, data analytics, media processing, and cloud platforms caused a fast growth of data centres. This fast growth comes with needs for large investments and increased power usage requirements. To cope with these issues without slowing down the innovation based on the adoption of pervasive computing technologies, dramatic decreases in costs and power requirements are required. A lot of opportunities are coming from the technology side and embedded computing architectures. New architectures with high computing power compared to their power consumption become widely available, such as mobile processors (e.g. ARM-based multi/manycore), embedded SoCs (System-on-Chip) including GPU or FPGA-based accelerators. Going beyond the separation between embedded and desktop/server markets, these architectures draw a continuum of computing resources, ranging from power-optimized micro-controllers to powerful manycore server chips, enabling designers to tailor a system to the exact needs of applications and workload with appropriate components. These challenges and opportunities are at the heart of the Modular Microserver DataCentre (M2DC) project.

Funded by

M2DC will investigate, develop, and demonstrate a modular, highly-efficient, cost-optimized server architecture composed of heterogeneous microserver computing resources, being able to be tailored to meet requirements from various application domains such as image processing, cloud computing or even HPC. To achieve this objective, M2DC is based on the results of different EU FP7 projects such as FiPS (for the management of heterogeneity in a server infrastructure) or Mont-Blanc (ARM-based HPC) and will be built on three main pillars:

• A flexible server architecture that can be easily customised, maintained, and updated so as to enable adaptation of the data centre.
• Advanced management strategies and system efficiency enhancements in order to improve the runtime behavior of the system regarding performance and energy efficiency.
• Well-defined interfaces to surrounding software ecosystems to enable easy integration into existing data centre management solutions.

The results of these three pillars will be combined to produce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)-optimized appliances, deployed in a real data centre environment and seamlessly interacting with existing infrastructure to run real-life applications.

The target architecture will be optimized with respect to the integration of computing resources with constrained thermal power dissipation such as embedded CPUs and GPUs, FPGAs, manycore processors, while also being able to integrate more powerful resources if needed. Built on established standards such as COM Express, the server architecture will enable the integration of third-party boards and chips, leading to what can be called an open server architecture. The server architecture will include built-in enhancements (e.g., for computing acceleration, enhancements of the global efficiency thanks to data management, dependability and security, behaviour monitoring, etc.) on system level. High power efficiency will be provided by an intelligent power management enabling to constantly optimize the power consumption of the system thanks to proactive and reactive strategies. To enable seamless integration into data centre software and management environments the latest middleware software for resource management, provisioning, etc will be used. For Building on the Linux operating system (e.g., Linaro for ARM-based compute modules) and other well-known software infrastructures, M2DC will also feature optimized runtime software implementations when needed for improving the efficiency of the system towards application domains such as cloud computing, big data analytics, and HPC applications.