Data Flow Computer Architecture
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Data Centers Babak Falsafi Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
Synonyms Internet data centers
Definition A Data Center is a facility hosting large collections of servers that are physically co-located to facilitate one or more combinations of Internet connectivity, operation infrastructure (such as power delivery and cooling), management, and providing access security.
Discussion Introduction Large organizations (e.g., enterprises, governmental agencies, research and academic institutions) have historically used machine rooms to host and operate a collection of server- and supercomputer-class computing platforms. The machine rooms were designed to leverage the cost of building, hosting and operating a collection of high-performance computers.
The exponential growth in information technology made possible by advancements in semiconductor fabrication for the past several decades has been met or surpassed by the growth in demand for computing. The net result is that computing platforms hosted in machine rooms have become denser (e.g., have a higher computational and storage capability per occupied unit volume), and machine rooms have been growing in size, increasingly hosting large collections of serverclass machines referred to as clusters or server farms. Today, information technology is an indispensable pillar for a modern society in general and industry in particular. Companies from start-ups to multinationals all have IT departments which are large organizations with many machine room installations that provide computing as a service internally to the company. Because most of the activity within an IT department is centered around processing and storage of data belonging to an organization, machines rooms have evolved into entities that are increasingly referred to as Data Centers. Today, Data Centers range in size from installations that have about thousands of processing cores and a few petabytes storage dissipating a few hundred kilowatts of electricity to hundreds of thousands of processing cores, hundreds of petabytes, and tens of megawatts of electricity.
Physical Layout As in machine rooms, a Data Center typically refers to a physical site. A site can be a shipping-container-sized entity, a room, one or more floors of a building, or a number of collocated buildings. The minimal physical unit to which network connectivity, power, and cooling are delivered to is referred to by some vendors as a POD. A POD is a collection of racks of hardware that are collocated and sit adjacent to each other. Containers are PODs that are optimized for transport and mobility and are sized exactly to be the size
David Padua (ed.), Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing, DOI ./----, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Data Centers
of a shipping container. PODs in a room are sized for maximum energy efficiency.
Servers The IT equipment in a Data Center consists of compute nodes or compute clusters (for processing), storage nodes or s
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