CAREER: a Disaggregated and Distributed Hardware and OS Framework for Next-Generation Datacenters

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We live in the big data era. The abundance of digital information enables us to have a better understanding of the world and to make intelligent decisions. However, the volume and variety of data and its generation speed raise many profound new challenges. Datacenters host and process data, and they play a key role in the success of all the applications. This project aims to answer a simple yet important question: how shall we build next-generation datacenters that are cost-effective and deliver good performance?For decades, the unit of deployment, operation, and failure in datacenters has been a computer server, that contains all the hardware resources that are needed to run a user program. However, this is too coarse for today's applications; it restricts the effectiveness of datacenter resource utilization, and limits the flexibility of hardware changes. As a result, there are huge energy and monetary wastes in today's datacenters and it is hard to incorporate new hardware innovations.This project intends to break the traditional server model into fine-grained hardware resources. Instead of packaging hardware devices in a server and connecting servers with a network, future datacenters will connect hardware devices directly to the network. Doing so makes it more flexible and cheaper to run applications and deploy new hardware. This project will build the software infrastructure for this new datacenter model. Through innovation, design, and development of the proposed infrastructure, this project will improve the flexibility and reduce the total cost of future datacenters.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.