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.