Clusters have emerged as the most effective solution to design high-performance servers, which are increasingly being deployed in supporting a wide variety of web-based services. Along with high and predictable performance, optimization of energy consumption in these servers has become a serious concern due to their high power budgets. In addition, the critical nature of many Internet-based services mandate that these systems should be robust to attacks from the Internet, because numerous security loopholes of cluster servers come to the forefront. Therefore, design and analysis of high-performance, energy-efficient, and secure clusters is crucial for the next-generation cluster systems not only from academic and industrial standpoints, but from socio-economic and environmental standpoints. Although some initial investigation on cluster energy consumption and security has appeared recently, an in-depth design and analysis of a cluster interconnect considering the three parameters above have not been undertaken. On the other hand, such an investigation is extremely challenging because there are numerous controllable factors across many dimensions and frequently these factors are conflicting. Therefore, the proposed research attempts to address three issues in a ground-up fashion starting from the basic cluster components to the entire system. It is planned to design all components to be plugged into the simulation testbed to assess their impacts on performance.
