Two data center technologies are among the research projects on display at this the Microsoft Research TechFest 2009 this week:
- Closed-Loop Control Systems for the Datacenter, a project aimed at improving the energy efficiency of datacenters by selectively putting idle servers into a low-power state while maintaining service response times
- Low-Power Processors for the Datacenter, an experiment to build a server from low-power processors and evaluate how well it runs some of the tasks typically performed in a datacenter, such as processing a large number of independent requests or running databases for a Web site.
Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, also announced a new research organization called Cloud Computing Futures aimed at reducing datacenter costs by fourfold or greater, while accelerating deployment and increasing adaptability and resilience to failures. “Our cloud computing research begins with a key concept: the datacenter is a computer, and it must be designed and programmed as an integrated system,” Rashid said. The group, led by Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore systems, will target lowering hardware costs and power consumption, as well as reducing the environmental impact of operations, particularly in carbon emissions.
http://www.microsoft.com/techfest