II-EN: Collaborative Research: Enhancing the Parasol Experimental Testbed for Sustainable Computing

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This project will enhance an experimental datacenter for sustainable computing. Datacenters consume vast amounts of energy, totaling about 1.8% of the US electricity usage in 2014. Thus, the energy efficiency, energy-related costs, and overall sustainability of datacenters are critical concerns. NSF funded an experimental green datacenter called Parasol, which has previously demonstrated that the combination of green design and intelligent software management systems can lead to significant reductions in energy consumption, carbon emission, and cost. The enhanced version of this project will update energy sources, network technologies and management software.Running real experiments in live conditions using Parasol led to findings that were not possible in simulation. This proposal seeks to update and enhance Parasol with current and next generation power-efficient servers, improve network connectivity and integrate software-defined networking (SDN) and Wi-Fi capabilities, increase solar energy generation capacity, add a low emission fuel cell power source, diversify energy storage, and improve the cooling system to advance green computing. The investigators will update and enhance Parasol's current software stack for monitoring, programmatic control, and remote access for the new hardware enhancements. Specific research goals are resource management in green datacenters, including coordinated workload, cooling, and energy scheduling against environmental and load variability to maximize the benefits of green datacenters and to help improve grid power management. A specific goal is to leverage accelerators such as GPUs and deep learning hardware, which promise excellent performance/watt ratios.