Testbed for New Energy-Efficient Data Center

Data centers are being deployed worldwide. They provide the fundamental computing and communication resources for both business customers and regular consumers. Different from traditional data centers, today's data centers must have the capability to provide services to millions of users on a dynamic basis. New data centers are designed to deploy large number of commodity servers and low-cost Ethernet switches to achieve scalability and cost efficiency. Energy consumption is another major issue that must be addressed. This project is proposed to address the cost and energy efficiency issues by developing a new type of optical networks. It is well-known that optical networks are the most cost-effective communication networks in terms of the bandwidth they carry. However to make optical networks fit into the ecosystem of data centers, some changes are required. This project will develop a testbed that deploys new optical devices based on the passive optical network concept. The new solution will be energy and cost efficient while still maintaining scalability. It will form an important part in future data center networks.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Changcheng Huang

Student:

Weiwei Li

Partner:

Viscore Technologies Inc.

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Carleton University