CAREER: Energy-Efficient Datacenters with Wireless Interconnection Networks

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The principal aim of this CAREER: Energy-Efficient Datacenters with Wireless Interconnection Networks project is to establish design principals of a wireless datacenter by integrating intra- and inter-chip wireless networks. Computing machinery around the world consumes staggering amounts of energy. According to the NY Times in September 2012, digital warehouses like datacenters use thirty billion watts of electricity, which is equivalent to the output of thirty nuclear power plants. Networked computing elements are omnipresent in all computing machinery like datacenters, servers and High Performance Computing (HPC). Tens to thousands of multicore chips are interconnected to form an entire datacenter making the role of the network paramount in the performance and energy efficiency of the entire system. Data transfer between cores or memory components in different chips in large computing machinery need to traverse various interconnection technologies at the different levels of the network, often requiring change of switching protocols thus resulting in overheads. More importantly, according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), the pitch of the interchip interconnects is not scaling as fast as the pitch of on-chip interconnects, resulting in a performance gap in the future. Additionally, the wiring complexity of both on-chip and off-chip interconnects exacerbates the problem by posing design challenges, crosstalk and signal integrity issues. Recent research envisions on-chip wireless interconnects using millimeter-wave (mm-wave) technologies for designing Network-on-Chips, which are significantly more energy-efficient compared to traditional architectures. On the other hand in recent years considerable research has been done to develop wireless datacenters using the same 60GHz unlicensed wireless spectrum. The integrated architecture proposed in this work will be capable of establishing wireless routes between communicating processing cores in a datacenter. This highly interdisciplinary project will engage experts from the disciplines of computer engineering, computer science and electrical engineering from both academia and industry. Using concepts and technologies from various domains like computer architecture, communication, integrated circuit packaging and datacenters, the project will establish methodologies for wireless interconnections in large-scale computing warehouses to decrease their energy consumption and carbon footprint, ultimately resulting in a green and sustainable computing paradigm.