| NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 7, 2008 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 30, 2011 |
| Award Number: | 0821155 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Rita Rodriguez
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 15, 2008 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2012 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $2,000,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $2,062,500.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2009 = $12,500.00 FY 2010 = $25,000.00 FY 2011 = $25,000.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
9500 GILMAN DR LA JOLLA CA US 92093-0021 (858)534-4896 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
9500 GILMAN DR LA JOLLA CA US 92093-0021 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
Major Research Instrumentation, Information Technology Researc, Special Projects - CNS |
| Primary Program Source: |
01000910DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001011DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001112DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Proposal #: CNS 08-21155
PI(s): DeFanti, Thomas A.
Krueger, Ingolf H.; Papadopoulos, Philip M.; Smarr, Larry L.; Vahdat, Amin M.
Institution: University of California ? San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0934
Title: MRI/Dev.: Development of Instrumentation for Project Green Light
Project Proposed:
This project, developing an instrument called GreenLight, measures, monitors, and optimizes the energy consumption of large-scale scientific applications from many different areas. The work enables inter-disciplinary researchers to understand how to make ?green? (i.e., energy efficient) decision for IT computation and storage. Consequently, an experienced team might be able to make deep and quantitative explorations in advanced architecture, including alternative circuit fabrics such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), direct-graph execution machines, graphics processors, solid-state disks, and photonic networking. The enabled computing and systems research will yield new quantitative data to support engineering judgments on comparative ?computational work per watt? across full-scale applications running at-scale computing platforms, thus helping to re-define fundamentals of systems engineering for a transformative concept, that of green CyberInfrastructure (CI). Keeping in mind that the IT industry consumes as much energy (same carbon footprint) as the airline industry, this project enables five communities of application scientists, drawn from metagenomics, ocean observing, microscopy, bioinformatics, and the digital media, to understand how to measure and then minimize energy consumption, to make use of novel energy/cooling sources, and employ middleware that automates optimal choice of compute/power strategies. The research issues addressed include studying the dynamic migration of applications to virtual machines for power consumption reduction, studying the migrations of virtual machines to physical machines to achieve network locality, developing new power/thermal management policies (closed loop, using feedback from sensors), classifying scientific algorithms in the context of co-processing hardware such as GPUs and FPGAs, and developing algorithms for resource sharing/scheduling in heterogeneous platforms. The full-scale virtualized device, the GreenLight Instrument, will be developed to measure, monitor, and make publicly available (via service oriented architecture methodology), real-time sensor outputs, empowering researchers anywhere to study the energy cost of at-scale scientific computing. Hence, this work empowers domain application researchers to continue to exploit exponential improvements in silicon technology, and to compete globally. Although the IT industry has begun to develop strategies for ?greening? traditional data centers, the physical reality of modern campus CI currently involves a complex network of ad hoc and suboptimal energy environments in departmental facilities. The number of these facilities increases extremely fast creating campus-wide crisis of space, power, and cooling due to the value of computational and data intensive approaches to research. This project addresses these important issues offering the possibility to improve.
Broader Impacts: The project enables researchers to carry-out quantitative explorations into energy efficient CyberInfrastructure (CI) and to train the next generation of energy-aware scientists. It enlists graduate students from five disciplinary projects, involves minority serving institutions, and is likely to have direct impact on commercial components of the nation?s CI.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Development of Instrumentation for Project GreenLight – Project Outcome Report
Outcome: Project GreenLight built a fully instrumented modular data center enclosed in a SunMD (an 8’x20’ modular sea storage container outfitted with 8 racks for computers and communications equipment). The racks were filled with a variety of computing and environmental sensing systems and turned over to GreenLight investigators to support energy efficiency research. Environmental data for the container and the computers within, including thermal characterization and power consumption, was collected 7/24 and made available to the researchers via a custom service oriented architecture application, GLIMPSE, with an easy to use graphical web interface, running on laptops, desktop computers and iPad’s. Also developed was a collection of visualization technologies, include 3D immersive CAVE and “Virtual Room” (VROOM) display walls used to display and share GreenLight energy data and allow for improved collaborations among groups of researchers.
Impact/benefits: Project GreenLight energy efficiency research activities have resulted in proof-of-concept experiments deploying many different techniques for reducing the energy costs in data centers, servers and networking equipment. These approaches to improving energy efficiency in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) are being put into practice in next generation data centers. Areas of demonstrated improvement include:
- Conservation of networking resources using virtualization supported by low latency power aware networking equipment and novel network management techniques
- Use of virtual and augmented reality to improve understanding of data and the feasibility of remote collaboration (and thus reduced need for travel)
- Use of process migration, improved fan speed algorithms and processor control, and liquid cooling to more efficiently manage computation, thermal generation and dissipation
- Use of coprocessors and alternative processing architectures, including FPGAs and GP GPUs, to reduce computational driven energy consumption
- Use of renewable energy (through direct DC power) and automated virtual machine migration (to remote computers using renewable energy, including photovoltaic, fuel cell, hydro and wind power) to reduce the carbon footprint of ICT (in servers, network switches and data centers)
- Application of service oriented architectures to energy and environmental related data collection, aggregation, management and display
- Application of advanced visualization techniques to allow for access to and interaction with the modular data center and its resources, to include environmental and energy data
Virtual room (VROOM) technologies will enable next generation scalable distributed, high-resolution visualization resources for collaborative work in the sciences, engineering and the arts. Examples of distributed applications include: collaboration with multiple high-resolution data types; prototyping command and control environments; digital cinema post-production review and editing; tele-immersive 3D interactions; brainstorming/storyboarding, and other pedagogical activities. The constructed VROOM facility also supports GreenLight research and education outreach through ongoing demonstrations and workshops.
A series of workshops were presented to minority-serving institutions in efforts to spread knowledge of Project GreenLight energy efficiency research activities and visualization technologies while they were under development. The workshops, in collaboration with the Minority Serving Institutions (MSI)—CyberInfrastructure (CI) Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC), were held yearly ...
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