II-EN: Collaborative Research: Enhancing the Parasol Experimental Testbed for Sustainable Computing
Amount: $729,725
Joint with Ohio State (Co-PI: Stewart) and Stony Brook (Co-PIs: Gandhi and Liu)
Overview: The datacenters that are increasingly servicing our computing needs consume a vast amount of energy. Thus, the energy efficiency, energy-related costs, and overall sustainability of datacenters are critical concerns that are garnering considerable amount of research. Unfortunately, much of this research has been significantly hampered by the lack of an experimental testbed that is instrumented and isolated. The Parasol "green" micro-datacenter was designed and built to address this gap, and has served as an effective instrument to support research involving power/energy, cooling, and their coordination with and impact on resource management, scheduling, and system/application performance and dependability.
This project proposes to update and enhance Parasol's infrastructure and computing systems as well as its software stack to make it an even more effective vehicle for research on sustainable computing. Specifically, we plan to populate the enhanced testbed, called Parasol-II, with current and next generation processor technologies, improve network connectivity and integrate software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities, increase solar energy generation capacity, add a low emission fuel cell power source, increase and diversify energy storage capacity, and improve the free-cooling system, as well as expand its capacity to meet the increased power consumption of the updated IT equipment. These enhancements are driven by the requirements of the research outlined in this proposal. At the same time, we will update and enhance Parasol's current software stack for monitoring, programmatic control, and remote access. This will allow Parasol-II to be used by a significantly expanded set of researchers from Rutgers, Ohio State, and Stony Brook.
