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Customer: University of California, San Diego Technology: 10 Gigabit Ethernet

GreenLight: Getting more computational work done for


fewer watts of energy
Evolution of Information Technology and the increasing
creasing 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 instal
installed base of servers has
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doubled . A project
oject 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 View of GreenLight racks inside the
capacity and efficiency - and reduction of energy costs. Modular Datacenter Container

How to enable green IT computer science


cience
A green strategy requires various steps: monitoring and controlling the use of electricity of network
network-
connected devices, design innovative ways to reduce energy consumption and then more monitoring and
measuring to refine the process. Academia
ademia 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
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project run by the scientists and engineers of UC San Diego, one of the greenest universities in the US.
Quadrics TG201-XA
TG201 10 GigE Switch
When
hen it is built, the GreenLight Instrument will measure, monitor and help optimize the energy
consumption of large-scale scientific applications from many different disciplines
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
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-XAXA 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
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faculty closets and into much greener configurations.”
10GE Link Aggregation: When
Quadrics TG201: Maximum Data Throughput, Minimum Latency and complete, the servers will connect
to edge switches via 1 Gbps links,
Minimum Power Consumption
and the edge switches will connect
Quadrics TG201-XAXA is a 1U, 10 GigE switch with 12 CX4 and 12 XFP ports. TG201 switches have the lowest to each other via the 10 Gbps links
latency in the 10 GigE market. Low latency (200ns) combined with high throughput (480Gbps) and fully of the Quadrics TG201 Switch.
non-blocking layer-22 switching make it an ideal solution for the ever
ever-demanding needs of the Data
Centres, high utilization virtualized servers, Campus network core switching and storage consolidation. In
the GreenLight cluster the TG201 switch aggregates 10GE GE links from each of the edge switches. Five “The Quadrics TG201 24-port
4 10GiGE switch is a full-bisection
additional channel-bonded links provide a 50 Gbps bps connection to the OptIPuter Core. In the quest to
bandwidth switch that enables
improve GreenLight energy efficiency the choice of Quadrics’ TG201
TG201-XA answered requirements for both us to richly connect the
higher performance and lower energy consumption. TG201 switches use between 20% and 80% less Greenlight Instrument into
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power per port than other products in the 10 GigE market . campus research networks. We
are driving DWDM optics directly
from the switch to support as
much as 80Gbit/sec on a single
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"Service-Based
Based Approaches to Improving Data Center Efficiencies
Efficiencies", IDC, 2007 fiber pair."
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The GreenLight project gets its name from its plan to connect scientists and thei
their labs to more energy-efficient
- Philip Papadopoulos,
'green' computer processing and storage systems using photonics - light over optical fiber. GreenLight Project
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“The
The UCSD/Calit2 GreenLight Project: Greening Universal Communication
Communication”, Tom DeFanti, 2008
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OptIPuter, so named for its use of Optical networking and Internet Protocol, is a Grid of computational, storage and
visualization resources between eight US Universities.
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Power usage obtained from vendors’ published material.
Better Power Usage Effectiveness for Full Scale applications
The GreenLight project is testing the energy eff
efficiency
iciency of computing systems under real-world
real
conditions. Applications as diverse as bioinformatics, digital media, metagenomics, microscopy and
ocean observing will be running on full-scale
scale computing platforms. Tom DeFanti: “We have selected 5
computation
computationally–intensive
intensive application projects from a broad range of disciplines, each of which can
benefit from the GreenLight Instrument. For each project, we first measure the current energy use, then
use GreenLight to devise strategies for evolving each to a more energy efficient mode, in the process
Above: UCSD campus (courtesy of giving our team critical end
end-user
user feedback on improving the instrument .” The target is to improve
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W.Parson). Below: view of the two Power Usage Effectiveness , by a combination of best practices adoption and efficient equipment.
equipment
Modular Datacenter Containers at
"The Quadrics TG201 24-port 10 GigE switch is a full-bisection
bisection bandwidth switch that enables us to
UCSD
richly connect the Greenlight Instrument into campus research networks. We are driving DWDM optics
directly from the switch to support as much as 80Gbit/sec on a single fiber
fibe pair."

- Philip Papadopoulos, GreenLight Project

Reducing costs and improving operational efficiency with 10 GigE


Gig
Academia and enterprise alike are looking for greener technology in order to reduce running costs,
lessen IT impact on earth and increase ththe
e long term returns. Business owners are always looking to
reduce the cost in power consumption. The GreenLight project shows how 10 GigE technology reduces
the running costs and improves operational efficiency in three ways:
• Scalability: 10 GigE prprovides computationally-intensive
intensive applications room to scale;
University of California, San Diego
• Network bandwidth: Servers are better utilized as the high bandwidth provided by 10 GigE reduces
Founded in 1960, the University of the inefficiencies of network bottlenecks ;
California, San Diego is one of the most
• Power Consumption: 10 GigE reducess the number of connections required to obtain high bandwidth,
accomplished research universities in
the US, widely acknowledged for its plus the switch itself has been designed for minimum power consumption.
local impact, national influence and
global reach. UC San Diego is one of the "The ICT sector and universities can play an important role in reducing carbon emissions to fight global
leading universities investigating energy warming,"" said Calit2 director Larry Smarr, a professor of computer science in UCSD's Jacobs School of
efficiency in information technology and Engineering. "A whole new generation of equipment is being designed to build out the rapidly growing
data centers. It is the only university Internet economy, and that equipment has to be much greener than what we have today."
member of Green Grid, an international
Luigi Lavorgna, Quadrics Director: “Thanks to the UC San Diego the technology sector will acquire
consortium dedicated to reducing
energy usage at data centers. UC San valuable insights to reduce the costs of running a business and boost efficiency. The private sector can
Diego has one of the largest and most benefit enormously from eefficient
fficient products that the evolution of information technology has made now
advanced university renewable energy available, and in particular with the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet products such as Quadrics TG201
programs. Switches.”
http://www.ucsd.edu

Quadrics Quadrics Contacts:


Quadrics is a leading supplier and E: sales@quadrics.com
s@quadrics.com
developer of high performance
T: +44 (0)117 9075375
networking products and resource
management software. Quadrics’ goal Address:
is to improve customer productivity by One Bridewell Street, Bristol, BS1 2AA, UK
providing trusted performant
technology. Hardware and software
that makes more efficient use of a
cluster of nodes will lower the electrical
power required to solve a given 6
problem. Quadrics integrates Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a metric used to determine th thee energy efficiency of a data centre, PUE is defined
as total facility power / IT equipment power. Overall efficiency improves as the quotient decreases toward 1.
environmental considerations into its
Example: PUE of 2.5 means that for every 2.5 watts in at the utility meter, one watt is delivered out to the IT load.
business strategy because this results in
better products.
http://www.quadrics.com

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