WIRELESS DATA CENTERS BY CORNELL COMPUTER SCIENTISTS

Cornell computer scientists have come up with a very innovative idea of wireless design for data centers. They say that these designs would help improve efficiency and reduce power consumption costs.

Data centers with a vast number of computers and servers consume thousands of kilowatts of power, making the maintenance very expensive.

“Reducing power consumption would not only cut costs but would be a benefit to the environment,” said Hakim Weatherspoon, assistant professor of computer science.

Weatherspoon, Emin Gun Sirer, associate professor of computer science, graduate student Ji-Yong Shin, and Darko Kirovski of Microsoft Research have proposed a research study called the Cayley Data Center. This design is based on wireless networking and has been named after mathematician Arthur Cayley, who first proposed the mathematics behind this design.

This design has been inspired by the 60 gigahertz wireless transceiver developed at Georgia Tech. This device is devised on the principle of the CMOS technology. The transceiver transmits in a very narrow range and the 60 GHz of power that is transmitted is attenuated by air. This energy reaches only 10 meters from the source and hence can be used for short range communications.

These wireless devices have not been released into the market yet and therefore cost comparisons with the regular switches and cables are difficult. But researchers say that the cost would be as low as 1/12 of the conventional switches and wires for a hypothetical data center with 10,000 servers.

“We argue that 60 GHz could revolutionize the simplicity of integrating and maintaining data centers,” the researchers concluded in

their paper.