The Case for Robotic Data Centers

David Meisner and Thomas Wenisch University of MichiganWild And Crazy Ideas (WACI) 2010

Presented by: David Meisner

2

A long time ago in a data center far, far away…

The LucasFilm data center ‘cleaning crew’

What else can robots do?

3

• The reason data centers exist is for physical collocation• Important for networking, security, and maintenance

Why not take advantage of this physical proximity?

Data Center SneakerNet

4

Ethernet Bandwidth: 1Gb/s

Robot Bandwidth: 2,155Gb/s

Robot Sort

5

New programming paradigm?Map – Robot Shuffle - Reduce

Warehouse robots

6Racks can be moved by robots…

Extreme Reconfigurable Computing

7Move the computation to the data! Literally.

Computation Resources Storage Resources

Other data center issues

8Many of these problems because of pesky humans!

• A number of practical issues:• Cooling• Repair and Maintenance• Safety• Security• Fire Regulation

Cooling: Extreme Infrastructure

9

Air – 1.0 J/(gk)Helium – 5.2 J/(gk)

Maintenance: Things break. Who will fix it?

10

Security…

11

How crazy is this?

12Robots have done some of this before

Thanks to our sponsors

13

Also thanks for creative input from: Arnab Nandi, Chris Sadler and Steven Pelley