Speaker:

Rui Hou, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Title:

Cost Effective Data Center Server

Abstract:

The exploding growth of digitalized information has led to the rapid growth of data centers, both in numbers and in size. Cluster has been the dominating system architecture used in most data centers. However, the increasingly diversified data center applications have requirements beyond what the cluster architecture can deliver. For instance, clouding computing requires flexible sharing of all data center resources. Big data applications often need large memory capacity. A few applications can use GPGPU effectively. Existing system might be extended to a certain degree to meet those needs. Those extensions however would often be prohibitively expensive. In this talk, I will introduces our attempt to design a system using commodity products that can meet the varying needs of many emerging data center applications in a cost-effective way. Our attempt is to create a system by connecting multiple nodes through a PCIe switch and then extend the software stack to support resource sharing among these nodes. In particular, a node can directly use the memory, NIC, and GPGPU of other nodes through the PCIe switch with no or little involvement from other nodes. We build a prototype as our evaluation platform. Our evaluation results indicate that those resources can be shared effectively in many cases. While our prototype system offers multiple benefits, it is not perfect and has a lot room for further optimization and extension. We hope the outcome presented in this talk will encourage more researchers to join us in designing highly efficient and cost-effective servers.

Bio:

Dr. Rui Hou is currently the associate professor in Institute of Computing, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and he leads the server team which is focus on building next generation data center server systems in advanced computer system laboratory. His major research interests include data center server, multi-core chip design and implementation, interconnect, and application explorations in the area of cloud & big data. Dr. Rui Hou received his BS and MS degrees from Harbin Institute of Technology, and PhD degree from Institute of Computing, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before his current position, he worked in IBM research – China from 2007 to 2011. Dr Rui Hou published tens of papers in HPCA, IISWC, DATE, EuroPar, and ICDM etc. He has over 40 patents in architecture and micro-architecture areas. As the major organizer, he initialized the data center server workshop (series) held injunction with HPCA. He also actively served for international community, including the web chair of HPCA 2013, local chair of PPoPP 2013, poster chair of Computing Frontier 2013 etc.