As the scale and complexity of computing and data infrastructures supporting science and engineering grow, power costs are becoming important concerns in terms of costs, reliability and overall sustainability. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important to understand power/performance behaviors and tradeoffs from an application perspective for emerging system configuration, i.e., those with multiple cores, deep memory hierarchies and accelerators. This project builds an instrumented experimental platform that supports such an understanding, and enables research and training activities in this area. Specifically, the proposed experimental platform is composed of nodes with a deep memory architecture that contains four different levels: DRAM, PCIe-based non-volatile memory, solid-state drive and spinning hard disk, in addition to accelerators. Power metering is deployed as part of the infrastructure.
The experimental platform enables the experimental exploration of the power/performance behaviors of large scale computing systems and datacenters as well as compute and data intensive application they support, and uniquely supports research toward understanding the management and optimization of these systems and applications. It also enables research in multiple areas, including: application-aware cross-layer management, power-performance tradeoffs for data-intensive scientific workflows and thermal implications of deep memory hierarchies in virtualized Cloud environments.
Data and compute intensive applications are becoming increasingly critical to a wide range of domains, and the ability to develop large-scale and sustainable platforms and software infrastructure to support these applications will have significant impact in driving research and innovations in these domains. The developed experimental platform enables key research activities to support this. It provides important insights that will impact the realization and sustainability of very large-scale infrastructures necessary for current and emerging data and compute intensive applications. The infrastructure also provides an important infrastructure for education and training in different areas related to power management, energy efficiency, data management, memory management, and virtualization.
