The M2DC Approach towards Resource-efficient Computing

The H2020 project Modular Microserver DataCentre (M2DC) investigates, develops and demonstrates a modular, highly-efficient, cost-optimized server architecture composed of heterogeneous microserver computing resources. The M2DC architecture can be tailored to meet requirements from various application domains such as image processing, cloud computing or HPC. To achieve this, M2DC is built on three pillars. (1) The RECSjBox, a flexible server architecture fully configurable with respect to application requirements supports the full range of microserver technologies, including low power ARM processors or FPGA accelerators as well as high performance x86 or GPU devices. (2) Advanced management strategies as well as system efficiency enhancements (SEE) improve the behaviour of the system during runtime, thereby addressing application acceleration, communications and monitoring & management. Moreover, an intelligent management module complements the middleware by proactive workload, therma l and power management to increase the energy efficiency. (3) Welldefined interfaces to the software ecosystem enable easy integration of the customized RECSjBox system into the existing data centre landscape. By integrating into OpenStack for bare metal orchestration of the microservers, the applicability in today’s data centre is granted. Current project results include new microserver designs based on ARM64 and Intel Stratix 10. The document presents TCO estimations and baseline benchmarks to show the high potential of accelerators for the targeted applications including image processing, Internet-of-things (IoT) data processing and others.