EuroCloud: A Green Data Center Effort

Thursday, 01 July 2010 15:03

Written by jeffrey clark

Companies, governments, and the public around the world are becoming increasingly aware of concerns regarding limited energy supplies and the ever-growing demand for that energy. In particular, concern is growing over the data center sector, which is an up-and-coming energy-hog market. Trends toward reduced energy consumption in cooling and other supporting infrastructure for data centers have been increasingly important, but data center operators must eventually turn to increased efficiency of IT equipment in the data center. To this end, the processor-design company has begun an effort in Europe to establish a “green” data center that provides drastic efficiency improvements over existing data centers.

ARM’s research project, called EuroCloud, involves partner organizations IMEC, Nokia, the University of Cyprus, and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). In addition, the project has received an undisclosed three-year funding commitment from the European Commission FP7 Programme. The goal of the project, according to the EuroCloud web site, is to demonstrate “a step function improvement in system density and energy efficiency for data center applications compared to current state-of-the-art platforms using incumbent processor architectures.” Ultimately, the EuroCloud project seeks to make construction of “super-efficient, environmentally clean and compact data centers for the deployment of green cloud computing services” possible for companies. At the heart of the research effort is ARM’s Cortex-A9 MPCore multicore processor. ARM has long been the undisputed champion of mobile processors, with its focus on low power consumption. ARM processors power numerous mobile devices, including, for instance, cell phones. EE Times Europe (“ARM to lead EC funded EuroCloud green data centre research initiative”) reports that according to Krisztian Flautner, vice president of research at ARM, “The ARM design philosophy has focused on optimizing energy efficiency to enable mobile platforms for 20 years.”

Although ARM’s devices are not as powerful as, for example, many of Intel’s x86-based processors, they offer superior power characteristics, which has been a tremendous factor in making ARM a giant in mobile computing. Because it does not offer the most powerful processors in terms of raw computing power, ARM does not have much of a presence in the data center, however.

An increasing interest in energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact may alter this situation, however. The EuroCloud project seeks to exploit ARM processors’ lower power consumption by employing them in the data center. Flautner goes on to say that in light of the improved characteristics of recently released ARM processors, “ARM technology can be applied to solve the massive energy challenges that exist in wireline equipment, including data centers.” Thus, although ARM may lag processing giants such as Intel, it offers processors with particular benefits in light of the need for energy efficiency in addition to just raw processing power.

In addition to ARM processors, EuroCloud will also focus on including three-dimensional DRAM memory and packaging techniques. EE Times Europe also cites IMEC’s Nikolas Minas, who believes that “3D packaging technology...will help redefine the tradeoff between power consumption and performance.” He goes on to say that “3D technology is revolutionizing the design of compute systems, and [it] may lead to significantly lower power consumption for data centers” These three-dimensional packaging techniques will, in addition to potentially reducing power consumption, increase density as well.

One can never get something for nothing. The same is true in the data center. Processing power requires energy, and at some point, reduced power consumption can only come at the cost of reduced processing performance. This concept is reflected in a statement from the EE Times Europe article, which notes that EuroCloud will rely on “‘good enough’ nodes of processor performance and high-bandwidth access to server memory” in an effort to make the data center more environmentally friendly (that is, less power hungry) and more cost effective. These “good enough” performance nodes, no doubt, mean that the data center may not boast the same level of potential performance as some data centers, but it will have enough to meet the needs of its operators. Thus, the EuroCloud project seems to be attempting to mix both a desire for energy efficiency with a certain sense of not adding processing power simply for the sake of having more such processing power.

Whether EuroCloud will produce the type of data center its participants are envisioning remains to be seen. Further, whether companies would adopt the same approach is uncertain. Nevertheless, the EuroCloud project is a noble attempt to solve one of the growing problems associated with data centers: high energy consumption and environmental impact.

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