Instrument Overview
The GreenLight Instrument will enable ‘green’ data decisions by offering a suite of physical-layer architectures, exposed via advanced middleware to our domain science users in biology and geoscience.
There are 5 levels of possible green optimization in the GreenLight Instrument:
- The container as the controlled environment: Black Box with instrumented rack space unlike any found on campuses, different from and more “contained” than is typical for conventional computer centers and faculty “closet” clusters. It can measure temperature at 40 points in the air stream (5 spots on 8 racks), internal humidity and temperature at the Sensor module, external temperature and humidity, incoming and exiting water temperature and power utilization in each of the 8 racks;
- The open instrument accessible via web services infrastructure: many sensor types will be provided and data fed to the outside world and internally back into virtualization software through SOAs;
- Rack/clusters to provide architectural instrumentation for power/temperature: each Black Box will have 7 rack spaces devoted to 1 type of cluster each, plus one rack for switches, enabling Instrument users to share and try out computing resources for specific experiments concerning applications, sensing and feedback control algorithms for managing power consumption. Our Cisco 65xx switches can provide, using the simple network monitoring protocol (SNMP), the amps, volts, and watts used by each linecard, total aggregate power available/used, power configuration, outlet and inlet temperature for multiple critical components on each linecard, cubic feet per minute cooling required per module, system fan status, and aggregate traffic flows across the switch on a macro basis (for all large flows) in short and longer periods of time;
Year One Update
In Year 1 we completed the construction of the initial GreenLight instrument and preliminary planning for a second all DC powered GreenLight instrument. The instruments consist of fully enclosed computer server facilities within specially modified and instrumented modular sea storage containers (Sun Microsystems Modular Datacenters, or MDs). UCSD completed the infrastructure design and construction (mechanical, physical, electrical, telecommunications) to support the instrument’s structural, power, cooling and data requirements. We specified, ordered, received and configured a variety of networking and server equipment, deployed it in the first instrument and turned it over to applications and systems researchers. We also established a public GreenLight web presence at http://greenlight.calit2.net/ , an internal web based working environment at http://wiki.greenlight.calit2.net/greenlight/ and began the development of a GreenLight data management environment.