dReDBox

For all the superior features that low-power computing systems exhibit compared to conventional high-end server designs, there has been a common design axiom that both technological trends are based on: the main-board and its hardware components form the baseline, monolithic building block that the rest of the hardware/software stack design builds upon. In such conventional systems, the proportionality of IT resources is fixed during design time and remains static throughout machine lifetime, with known ramifications in terms of low system resource utilization, costly upgrade cycles and degraded energy proportionality.

dReDBox takes on the challenge of revolutionizing the low-power computing ecosystem by breaking once and for all server boundaries through materialization of the concept of disaggregation. dReDBox is strategically tailored to entirely break the root cause of such effects by modularizing low-power components,innovating with optical interconnection technology of adequately low latency to sustain this paradigm shift and providing for all required system software to drive fine-granular resource utilization. Through a highly modular, rack-scale architecture, dReDBox specifies, designs and prototypes modular blocks of SoC-based microservers, memory and accelerators, interconnected via a high-speed, low-latency optical fabric and integrated into a single platform. In a dReDBox system, pool instances can be allocated in arbitrary sets, as driven by fit-for-purpose resource/power management software. dReDBox components allow for deployment in various integration form factors and target scenarios, as manifested by three target application use-cases being realized in the project, namely Security, Network Analytics and Telecom.

Overall, dReDBox has the objective to design and develop a vertical approach for a flexible modular datacenter-in-a-box architecture starting from the hardware platform. Its design aims to redefine the datacenter hardware building blocks by creating mainboard trays with homogeneous components that form resource pools. dReDBox features a scalable hypervisor layer that will abstract all resource pools and orchestration software and will assign resources to virtual machines. dReDBox aims to deliver enhanced elasticity and improved virtual machine migration within the datacenter. The resource pools feature commodity, densely integrated, modular SoC-based compute blocks and high performance memory modules. The interconnect switching technology used features highly integrated, low-power, low-cost, low-footprint, and scalable technologies for module-to-module and tray-to-tray communication. dReDBox aims to significantly improve the capital and operational costs thanks to tying the pay-as-you-grow model much tighter to actual hardware utilization and significant decrease of the required power budget.