Datacenters of the Future

Abstract

New workloads are creating opportunities for novel optimized computing platforms in the datacenter. Furthermore, modern data centers are growing due to economies of scale and are facing significant challenges around power, underutilization, and high management cost.

The first part of this presentation will focus on how the requirements of workload consolidation, real world aware and network optimized computing will result in a diversity of platforms optimized for power and cost. I will discuss optimal SMP design points, stream processing, and the role of massive muticore and hybrid architectures.

The second part of the presentation will focus on the simplification of systems management. A new "datacenter architecture" is emerging to support massive application growth. This trend, coupled with some key technology trends such as virtualization and autonomic-homogeneous server-ensembles, will lead to fundamental changes in traditional enterprise datacenters. I will describe an exciting "living-lab" we have created IBM Research to explore this new data center architecture.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Tilak Agerwala is Vice President, Systems at IBM Research. He is responsible for developing the next-generation technologies for IBM’s systems, from microprocessors to commercial systems and supercomputers, as well as novel supercomputing algorithms and applications.

Tilak joined IBM at the T.J. Watson Research Center and has held executive positions at IBM in research, advanced development, development, marketing, and business development. His research interests are in the area of high performance computer architectures and systems.

Tilak received the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE in 1998 for “outstanding contributions to the development of high performance computers”. He is a founding member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.