Collaborative Research: II-NEW: An Instrumented Data Center Infrastructure for Research on Cross-Layer Autonomics

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This project's goal is to acquire and develop an instrumented datacenter testbed spanning the three sites of the NSF Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC)-the University of Florida (UF), the University of Arizona (UA) and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (RU). Datacenters are a growing component of society's IT infrastructure, including services related to health, banking, commerce, defense, education and entertainment. Annual energy and administration costs of today's datacenters amount to billions of dollars; high energy consumption also translates into excessive heat dissipation, which, in turn, increases cooling costs and increases servers' failure rates. The proposed testbed will enable a fundamental understanding of the operations of data centers and the autonomic control and management of their resources and services. The design of the underlying infrastructure reflects the natural heterogeneity, dynamism and distribution of real-world datacenters, and includes embedded instrumentation at all levels, including the platform, virtualization, middleware and application layers. Its scale and geographical distribution enables studies of challenges faced by datacenter applications, services, middleware and architectures related to both "scale-up" (increases in the capacity of individual servers) and "scale-out" (increases in the number of servers in the system). This testbed will enable fundamental and far-reaching research focused on cross-layer autonomics for managing and optimizing large-scale datacenters. The participant sites will contribute complementary expertise-UA at the resource level, UF at the virtualization layer, and RU in the area of services and applications. The collaboration between the university sites will bring coherence across ongoing separate research efforts and have a transformative impact on the modeling, formulation and solution of datacenter management problems, which have so far been considered mostly in terms of individual layers. The testbed will also provide a critical infrastructure for education at multiple levels, including providing students with hands-on experience via course projects, enable development of new advanced multi-university and cross-disciplinary courses, as well as multi-site group projects focused on end-to-end autonomics, which will use the proposed testbed. Students from underrepresented groups will be actively involved in the research and their participation will be increased through ongoing collaborations with minority institutions. Even broader community participation will result from an evolving partnership with the recently proposed industry cloud initiatives.