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Ultra-high Performance, Low Power, and Ubiquitous Data Centers on a Chip
Today’s computing has been a great success. Healthcare, financial, communication, and entertainment industries rely heavily on data centers. By some estimates, the amount of data processed in data centers is doubling every year. At this pace, there will be needs for many ultrahigh-performance data centers processing 1000 times more data in the next decade. However, today’s data centers typically consume ~ Megawatts of power, require > 100 racks, and weigh many tons. Scaling to a larger scale and higher performance data centers and supercomputing centers is fundamentally difficult even if the
Moore
’s law successfully continues to realize highly-integrated computing chips. In fact, the
Moore
’s law is already facing significant challenges due to the fundamental issues such as atomic dimensions, impedance, and power dissipation (the power-per-processing ratio is not improving). On the other hand, recent advances in nano- and micro-photonics promises great potentials for interconnecting and switching information on the same platform as electronics.
We propose to design, prototype, and test a revolutionarily new computing system with orders of magnitude reduction in power consumption and size compared to the current state of the art. Such a computing system can be realized on a ‘chip’ to enable a clustered super computing data center scalable to 100 Petaflop or to allow a high-performance data center to be at everyone’s homes, offices, hospitals, and automobiles. Ubiquitously networked supercomputing will not only revolutionarily transform our lives but also help solve grand-challenge problems. Proposed is a comprehensive research Center project which pursues a clean-slate approach to designing innovative hardware and software technologies for next generation computing systems.