Quadrics 10 GigE Switch Case Study - GreenLight Project by UC San Diego

Getting more computational work done for fewer watts of energy


Evolution of Information Technology and the increasing energy demands that go with higher computational power have historically been an obstacle to sustainability. Recent IDC research shows that over the past ten years the average cost to power and cool an installed base of servers has doubled . A project run by the University of California, San Diego aims to measure the energy efficiency of new technologies such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GigE) and their impact on cluster capacity and efficiency - and reduction of energy costs.
How to enable green IT computer scienceA green strategy requires various steps: monitoring and controlling the use of electricity of network-connected devices, design innovative ways to reduce energy consumption and then more monitoring and measuring to refine the process. Academia and enterprise often collaborate in this research, looking for ways to get more computational work done for fewer watts of energy. This is the scope of GreenLight, a project run by the scientists and engineers of UC San Diego, one of the greenest universities in the US. When it is built, the GreenLight Instrument will measure, monitor and help optimize the energy consumption of large-scale scientific applications from many different disciplines. What makes the project exemplary is that the cluster used to run the measurements and the monitoring has been designed to use less energy than most data centers: GreenLight consists of an eco-friendly Sun Modular Datacenter container with 8 racks of servers. When fully populated, the servers will connect to 7 edge switches via 1 Gbps links and the edge switches will connect with 10 GigE uplinks to the Quadrics TG201-XA switch, which maintains low latency and high bandwidth and ensures the end users quality of service. The immediate advantage, as Tom DeFanti, GreenLight principal investigator, explains, is that "GreenLight uses 10 Gbps over dedicated optical fiber links so end users move their clusters out of their faculty closets and into much greener configurations".