January 27, 2014
Academic and industry researchers gathered at Rutgers University in New Jersey this past December to talk green data storage. Hosted by the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, the three-day event drew minds from the fields of operations research, computer architecture and communications and coding theory to tackle the problem of energy-greedy data centres. The event was co-organized by Professor Stark Draper of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Dr. Emina Soljanin of Bell Labs.
“Our objective was really to bring people from these communities together because this is a big problem that touches on algorithms, computing, and operations research,” said Draper. “These are people who don’t always interact.”
Big servers spend enormous amounts of computing and energy resources on replicating and backing up data—in some cases, as much as 30 per cent of internal traffic in these data centres is devoted to recovering data lost due to equipment failure, replicating it, and backing it up. The environmental and economic footprint of powering these centres is huge. Operating them more reliably and efficiently, while still meeting quality-of-service demands, was the challenge posed at the Working Group on Algorithms for Green Data Storage.
“Powering these things is a big deal,” said Professor Draper. “We wanted to focus on how big data clusters, such as those as companies like Facebook and Google, can operate more efficiently.”
While at Rutgers, attendees enjoyed a tour of Parasol, the university’s micro-data center powered in part by solar cells on its roof.
“Reliability issues have been around for a long time,” said Professor Draper. “But I think we’re at a place where some of these ideas are mature enough that they’re starting to get traction in industry.” The group plans to reconvene at Rutgers in a year’s time to discuss outcomes and lessons learned.
Slides from the talks are available online now. Read the complete report on the event.
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca