August 2013 was the month in which Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung partnered up to launch the Internet.org initiative, a global effort to make affordable Internet access available to the next five billion people. Current global cost of delivering data is 100 times too expensive for this plan to be economically feasible, but Facebook believes that it is reasonable to expect the overall efficiency of delivering data to increase by 100 in the next 5 to 10 years.
Two key factors are in question for this strategy to be possible:
– Bringing down the underlying costs of delivering data
– Using less data by building more efficient apps
In April 2011 Facebook opened the datacenter in Pineville, Oregon and showed the world it can achieve an overall PUE of just 1.07. In 2013 the newest data center was brought online in Sweden, the measurements showing a PUE of 1.04, among the best in the world. It is cooled by 100 percent outdoor air and runs on 100 percent renewable hydroelectric power. The interior of the server hall, from the servers to the racks, is provisioned with 100% Open Compute Project designs.
Focusing of efficiency Facebook is constantly giving an example on how to achieve the best performance out of less energy, without gambling with user data. I will present below several concepts that the social networking giant already has in production or on in the research lab.
But firstly for those who aren’t familiar with the project here is a link where you can read about the Open Compute Project.
Outdoor Air Cooling: Traditional datacenters that use chillers or cooling towers are both ineffective and have a detrimental effect on the environment. Facebook uses an evaporative cooling system that brings in outside air and then lowers the temperature of that air by adding humidity. Facebook uses the outside air as a first stage of cooling, which is also known as outside air economization. Outside air enters the data center, gets filtered and directed down to the servers, and is then either re-circulated or exhausted back outside. When the outside air needs extra cooling, Facebook data centers employ either a direct ECH misting system or the use of wetted media. In Prineville data center, direct evaporative cooling operates 6% a year on average, and will be less than 3% for Luleå because of its cooler climate.
source: Internet.org
Power Management: Facebook rethought every part of their power management system to optimize for efficient power consumption, such as cutting out a stage of power transformers, using a higher voltage throughout the facility, and removing everything that doesn’t directly benefit efficiency. Luleå data center uses a new, patent-pending system for UPS that reduces electricity usage by up to 12%. And given the robustness of the utility grids in Luleå, they have been able to reduce the number of backup generators by 70%.
source: http://www.readwrite.com
Vanity-Free Server Design: The Open Compute Project design philosophy, Facebook’s so called “vanity-free”, eliminates anything from the designs that isn’t necessary to the function of that device. A good example of this philosophy in practice can be found in the removal of the plastic bezel from the front of the first web server designs. What was found was that not only that bezel is unnecessary from a materials standpoint—it was a non-functional piece of plastic on every server that would need to be commissioned and then recycled at end of life—but the bezel was also impeding air flow through the server, meaning the server fans needed to consume more energy to cool the device. Removing these bezels from the front of the servers reduced fan power consumption by 25 Watts per server, when compared with other web server models at the time.
source: http://www.readwrite.com
In terms of Future Work, Facebook is already working on the following:
Network switch: Even if the computing is done via OCP design servers, the switching is still done with black box proprietary switches. OCP recently expanded its focus to include networking, collaborating on the development of an OS-agnostic switch that is designed for deployment at scale and will allow consumers to modify or replace the software that runs on them.
Cold Storage: Cold data storage is increasingly in demand as more people share more content that needs to be stored, like old photos that are no longer accessed regularly but still need to be available. However, there’s a lot of progress to be made in developing a system with high capacity at low cost.
The Open Compute specification for cold storage is designed as a bulk load fast archive. The typical use case is a series of sequential writes, but random reads.
source: http://www.readwrite.com
Disaggregated Rack: Much of the hardware built and consumed as an industry is highly monolithic — the processors are inextricably linked to the motherboards, which are in turn linked to specific networking technology, and so on. This leads to inefficient system configurations that can’t keep up with evolving software and in turn waste energy and material. First steps toward this kind of rack disaggregation are:
- Silicon photonics: Intel is contributing designs for its upcoming silicon photonics technology, which will enable 100 Gbps interconnects, which is enough bandwidth to serve multiple processor generations. This technology’s low latency allows components that previously needed to be bound to the same motherboard to be spread out within a rack.
- “Group Hug”Facebook is contributing a specification for a new common slot architecture for motherboards that can be used to produce boards that are completely vendor-neutral and will last through multiple processor generations.
- New SOCs: AMD, Applied Micro, Calxeda, and Intel have all announced support for the Group Hug board, and Applied Micro and Intel have already built mechanical demos of their new designs
To conclude, I can’t be that naive to think that Facebook does all this from the kindness of their hart, this also serves their purpose to evolve and have a better infrastructure. On the other hand, open sourcing their designs the initiatives that they fight for come as a benefit to the whole community worldwide and that is something that deserves our admiration.
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