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.
"As a leader in the field of information technology, UC San Diego has a responsibility to reduce the amount of energy required to run scientific computing systems, said UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. "Project GreenLight will train a new generation of energy-aware scientists, and it will produce energy consumption data to help investigators throughout the research community make informed choices about energy-efficient IT infrastructure.
"If we are going to continue to allow ourselves the benefits of advances in computing, we need to understand power and cooling requirements much better, said Thomas A. DeFanti, a research scientist at Calit2 and principal investigator of the GreenLight project.
The NSF infrastructure grant allows UCSD to acquire two Sun Modular Datacenter S20s (Sun MD), one that is already installed, the second in year-three of the project. The large shipping containers can accommodate up to 280 servers, with an eco-friendly design that can reduce cooling costs by up to 40 percent when compared to traditional server rooms. To eliminate the need for air conditioning, each Sun MD's closed-loop water-cooling system uses built-in heat exchanges between equipment racks to channel air flow. This allows the unit to cool 25 kilowatts per rack, roughly five times the cooling capacity of typical datacenters. The industry-standard racks can also be placed close together, further reducing the structure's overall eco-footprint and increasing energy efficiency by eliminating dead space.
"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.
The GreenLight Instrument will use sensors in the controlled datacenter environment to measure temperature (at 40 points in the air stream), humidity, energy consumption and other variables, in addition to monitoring the internal measurements of the servers. Researchers hope to use the data to find ways to minimize the power needed to run computers, to make use of novel cooling sources, and to develop software that automates the optimizing of power strategies for each given computing process.
Some of the research groups participating in GreenLight will re-locate servers, switches, computer clusters and related equipment to be deployed inside the first Sun Modular Datacenter. The scientists will continue to operate their equipment virtually and remotely over UCSD's high-performance network, just as if the computers were still in their labs. Indeed, many researchers may not even know where the computers are located.
"If the networking is transparent, the scientists won't care where the computers are as long as the data gets from their devices and back to their screens without delay, said DeFanti. "The full-scale GreenLight Instrument will measure, monitor and make publicly available real-time sensor outputs using a service-oriented architecture methodology, empowering researchers anywhere to study the energy cost of at-scale scientific computing.
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.
Researchers in GreenLight advocated for full-scale computational and storage configurations in order to entice faculty and graduate students to run their computational work through GreenLight. "We are asking 25 faculty and researchers to work with us with no money for students, summer salary or even system administrative support, said DeFanti. "We wouldn't be able to retain them and get usable data if we were only offering toy-scale computation.
Computer scientists will use GreenLight to study topics ranging from virtualization for optimizing resource utilization, to power and thermal management. Jim Hollan, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, will study how access to energy costs may influence the behavior of scientists in using shared computational resources - especially when the energy use is visible to the wider community.
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.
In addition to Sun Microsystems, other industry partners in GreenLight include San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems, Inc. Cisco is contributing use of its CiscoWave network on the National LambdaRail (NLR) on an as-available basis.