On interconnecting and orchestrating components in disaggregated data centers: The dReDBox project vision

Abstract

Computing systems servers -low- or high-end ones have been traditionally designed and built using a main-board and its hardware components as a “hard” monolithic building block; this formed the base unit on which the system hardware and software stack design build upon. This hard deployment and management border on compute, memory, network and storage resources is either fixed or quite limited in expandability during design time and in practice remains so throughout machine lifetime as subsystem upgrades are seldomely employed. The impact of this rigidity has well known ramifications in terms of lower system resource utilization, costly upgrade cycles and degraded energy proportionality. In the dReDBox project we take on the challenge of breaking the server boundaries through materialization of the concept of disaggregation. The basic idea of the dReDBox architecture is to use a core of high-speed, low-latency opto-electronic fabric that will bring physically distant components more closely in terms of latency and bandwidth. We envision a powerful software-defined control plane that will match the flexibility of the system to the resource needs of the applications (or VMs) running in the system. Together the hardware, interconnect, and software architectures will enable the creation of a modular, vertically-integrated system that will form a datacenter-in-a-box.