Modular Microserver DataCentre

Project Information

M2DC

Grant agreement ID: 688201

DOI

10.3030/688201

Project closed

EC signature date 12 November 2015

Start date 1 January 2016

End date 30 June 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 7 998 935,00

EU contribution

€ 7 998 935,00

Coordinated by

INSTYTUT CHEMII BIOORGANICZNEJ POLSKIEJ AKADEMII NAUK
Poland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - M2DC (Modular Microserver DataCentre)

Reporting period: 2017-07-01 to 2019-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

New technologies including advanced mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and machine learning, pose steadily increasing demands on the performance and energy efficiency of server platforms and data centres. Heterogeneous hyperscale data centres target these challenges with a combination of highly scalable server platforms and integrated hardware accelerators, e.g. based on GPUs and reconfigurable hardware. Against this background, 14 companies, research institutes and universities collaborated in the H2020 project M2DC (Modular Microserver Data Centre) on the development of turnkey appliances, which can be easily configured, produced, installed and maintained. The basis for these appliances is the M2DC server, a modular, highly efficient, cost-optimized server architecture, seamlessly integrating heterogeneous microservers and hardware accelerators. Built-in efficiency and dependability enhancements are combined with an intelligent power management for continuous optimization of power and performance.

The Modular Microserver DataCentre (M2DC) project developed a new class of energy-efficient TCO-optimized appliances with built-in efficiency and dependability enhancements. The appliances are easy to integrate with a broad ecosystem of management software and fully software-defined to enable optimization for a variety of future demanding applications in a cost-effective way. The highly flexible M2DC server platform enables customization and smooth adaptation to various types of applications, while advanced management strategies and system efficiency enhancements (SEE) can be used to improve energy efficiency, performance, security and reliability. Data centre capable abstraction of the underlying heterogeneity of the server is provided by an OpenStack-based middleware.

The main concept of M2DC development is presented in the M2DC Architecture figure.

The specific objectives met by the M2DC project were as follows:
• Development of the new class of appliances with minimised Total Cost of Ownership,
• Reduction of energy consumed by the appliances,
• Development of built-in dependability functions,
• Versatility, customisation and scalability thanks to fully software-defined design,
• Intelligent power management,
• Easy and powerful integration with existing data centre ecosystems,
• Enabling easy adoption of cutting-edge hardware technologies for selected applications,
• Demonstration of appliances for a broad set of relevant applications.

All these objectives have been met by M2DC leading to high improvements in efficiency and the TCO. Efficiency was improved by a factor of up to 11 while TCO improvements reached 65% reduction of costs required for standard servers.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

M2DC delivered the main project results including the base and application-optimised appliances based on the heterogeneous M2DC server. All the application specific appliances were developed and evaluated reaching in many cases significant efficiency and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) gains, higher than 50%.

In more detail, M2DC developed a resource-efficient, highly scalable heterogeneous microserver platform able to integrate various microservers and hardware accelerators. Within the project, the consortium worked on microservers that use high-performance ARMv8 server processors; low-power ARMv8 embedded/mobile processors; x86 processors; and accelerators (MPSoCs, GPUs, and FPGAs). This includes a new microserver designs based on ARMv8 and Intel Stratix 10.
The main features of the platform include energy efficiency, built-in hardware accelerated functions and lower costs of deployment and upgrades. Baseline benchmarks show the high potential of accelerators for the targeted applications including photo finishing systems, IoT data processing, cloud computing, artificial neural networks and HPC. The platform includes an optimized middleware for deployment of the optimized appliances. The mid-range version of the platform can contain up to 144 low power and 27 high performance microservers as illustrated in the Mid-range chassis and Microservers figures.

The project also reached high visibility and well defined exploitation plans, accompanied by multiple ideas for the M2DC results uptake and future development (including edge computing, HPC education, machine learning applications and more).
The M2DC exploitation model includes different paths of commercialisation of the core technology.
Hardware components that were developed in the context of the R&D activities and platform production have their own commercialisation potential. The most relevant examples of these are COM Express modules integrated with Intel/Altera SX10 FPGA and Hi1616 ARM CPU. The base appliance is the most general M2DC product. It affects a wide range of heterogeneous modular microserver related markets. It can be customised to fit the needs of a specific domain, an effort that needs to be considered in a case-to-case analysis. General tools that can be exploited also include software components such as intelligent management tools or OpenStack extensions upstream. Finally, M2DC results are used to provide preconfigured appliances. To target identified emerging markets – HPC, Cloud, IoT and Image Processing – the Consortium developed specific appliances to address the specific needs of the common customers coming from these domains.

The impact of M2DC results should include significantly reduced energy consumption, easier and faster deployment and upgrades, and consequently, lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – leading to costs of the servers purchase and operation decreased by even 65%.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

M2DC is a resource-efficient, highly scalable heterogeneous microserver platform integrating: high-performance ARMv8 server processors; low-power ARMv8 embedded/mobile processors; x86 processors; and accelerators (MPSoCs, GPUs, and FPGAs). It’s goals are: (i) resource efficiency; (ii) high reliability; and (iii) high maintainability. With a blade style design, hot pluggable/swappable, adds up to 240 low-power microservers or 45 high-performance microservers per chassis.
M2DC enables customization and smooth adaptation to various types of applications, while advanced management strategies and system efficiency enhancements (SEE) will be used to achieve high levels of energy efficiency, performance, security and reliability. The M2DC middleware provides a data centre capable abstraction of the underlying heterogeneity of the server. This includes a new microserver designs based on ARM64 and Intel Stratix 10 (the first such COM Express modules available on the market). Baseline benchmarks show the high potential of accelerators for the targeted applications including photo finishing systems, IoT data processing, cloud computing (Platform as a Service), CNN and HPC.

As illustrated in the Impact figure M2DC will provide new data centres with advanced power monitoring and control mechanisms, hardware customised to individual needs, appliances optimised to relevant classes of emerging applications, and consequently lower costs and reduced energy consumption.

Small chassis

Impact

Mid-range chassis

M2DC Architecture

Microservers