RINGS: Power Resilient NextG Data Centers

下一代数据中心将在紧凑和可变的功率范围内运行。可再生能源和极端天气的增加导致电力供应的变化无常。同时，用户流失导致的数据中心利用率波动增加了电力需求的变化性。电力需求和电力供应必须在越来越短的时间范围内保持平衡，而数据中心对电力事件的恢复能力对于它们的可用性至关重要。该项目的目标是构建和评估数据中心电源控制平面(PCP)。通过软件定义，PCP可以在很小的粒度和较短的时间范围内控制电力需求。关键是随着时间的推移，优雅地权衡权力和服务质量。这允许PCP在电力事件期间减少或整合负载以节省电力。PCP旨在通过电力超订用来减少电源灾难的恢复延迟、延长电力中断的时间，并提高下一代数据中心的能效。为了使PCP实用化，我们提出了几个研究问题，例如如何扩大电力需求并提供仪表和控制；如何利用数据中心各种处理设备的不同功率包络；如何确定可削减的负载，以及如何透明地控制它；如何进一步减少故障转移和停电后的恢复延迟？下一代数据中心将为全球大部分社会提供时间和生命关键服务。通过提供电力恢复能力，该项目有可能显著提高下一代服务可用性，启用关键服务，并避免电力灾难以拯救生命、缩小电力紧急情况的爆炸半径并限制电力灾难的成本。这项工作还将影响下一代系统工程师的教育，因为相关的项目材料可以作为强调电源弹性的课程，以更好地为学生准备这些涉及计算方方面面的变化。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Next-generation data centers will operate under tight and variable power envelopes. Renewable energy and an increase in extreme weather lead to more power supply variability. At the same time, fluctuating data center utilization caused by user churn increases power demand variability. Power demand and supply have to be kept in balance at increasingly short timescales and resiliency of data centers to power events is paramount for their availability. This project's goal is to build and evaluate a data center power control plane (PCP). PCP can control power demand at a fine granularity and over short timescales by making it software-defined. The key is to gracefully trade off power and quality of service over time. This allows PCP to shed or consolidate load to conserve power during a power event. PCP aims to reduce recovery latency from power disasters, outlive power disruptions, and improve the energy efficiency of next-generation data centers via power oversubscription. Several research questions are addressed to make PCP practical, such as how to scale power demand and supply instrumentation and control; how to leverage the diverse power envelopes of various processing devices available in a data center; how to determine sheddable load, and how to control it transparently; how to further reduce fail-over and recovery latency from power outages?Next-generation data centers will provide time and life-critical services to a large portion of society globally. By providing power resiliency, this project has the potential to dramatically improve next-generation service availability, to enable critical services, and to avert power disasters to save lives, reduce the blast radius of a power emergency, and constrain the cost of a power disaster. The work will also influence the education of the next generation of systems engineers, as associated project materials can serve as courseware emphasizing power resiliency to better prepare students for these changes touching every aspect of computing.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.