YINS

Energy efficiency in datacenters is of strategic importance to Switzerland, as over 75% of the Swiss economy is service-based and depends on information technology (IT), which makes Switzerland one of top spenders of IT per capita. The design of datacenters today is a really complex process, where important opportunities exist both within and across various server and infrastructure components. Server software, system and silicon technologies as well as infrastructure for cooling and power delivery have historically been designed in isolation with an over provisioning of resources to guarantee a desired quality of service.

In YINS, we propose to develop a radically new thermal-aware design approach for next generation energy-efficient datacenters. This new design approach tightly integrates the cooling infrastructure definition with holistic system-level power, performance and thermal management. This vertically-integrated system-level management paradigm goes beyond hardware and software boundaries by redesigning the entire datacenter to maximize performance given a target power, area and cost budget. Therefore, we propose develop new server technologies based on Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) and specialized server architectures. Finally, these novel architectures interact with new passive thermosyphon cooling systems for the server, rack and room-level, as well as energy recovery strategies for the complete datacenter.

To realize its vision, YINS requires inter-disciplinary research at the boundaries of multiple scientific domains, as well as developing and integrating innovations in critical research areas, namely, computer systems, circuits and semiconductor technologies, and cooling technologies, large-scale simulation, software synthesis and optimization, statistical network modeling and model predictive control theory. Therefore, the YINS consortium includes six world-renown academic partners from EPFL and ETHZ covering key research areas of computer, electrical and mechanical engineering, and three key industrial partners in Switzerland for datacenter design and large-scale IT banking services provisioning (Credit Suisse, Eaton and BrainServe), and three third-party industrial partners (Constellium, Friotherm and Osmoblue).

Links:

• external pageNano-Tera.ch websitecall_made

Selected Publications