Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,University of Thessaly, Greece
The project aims to develop a universal system architecture and software ecosystem for energy-efficient high-performance micro-servers, facilitating the evolution of the Internet from an infrastructure where data is aggregated to centralized data-centres to an infrastructure where data are handled in a distributed and localized manner close to the data sources. This goal will be realized by greatly improving the energy efficiency, performance, dependability and security of the current state-of-the-art micro-servers, while reinforcing the supported system software. The project will develop effective means to expose the intrinsic hardware heterogeneity caused by process variations, harness it and use it to its advantage for improving energy efficiency or performance. Lightweight software-based mechanisms will be embedded for exposing to the system software the pessimistic voltage/frequency margins currently adopted in commercial processor and memory, which will be enhanced with new margin/fault-aware runtime and resource management policies. This technology will be ported on the world-first 64-bit ARM based Server-on-Chip and will be evaluated using state-of-the-art applications deployed in classical cloud business data-centres as well as in newer edge environments.
EC – H2020 Lower-Power Micro-Server Computing Call
CSL contributes to the design of the system software stack and the definition of the interfaces with low-level software that monitor system performance and conduct stress tests. CSL is responsible for the development of an advanced hypervisor that exploits this information to set the operating point of the system’s cores at just-the-right power/frequency levels so as to enable a more energy-efficient execution of the application-specific VMs, and which will tolerate failures as well as transparently restart applications in case of crashes.
