M2DC participated at the HiPEAC conference held in Stockholm, Sweden from January 23 to 25, 2017. On Monday, January 23, Giovanni Agosta and Jens Hagemeyer presented the paper “M2DC: Modular Microserver DataCentre with Heterogeneous Hardware” at the Workshop on Energy-efficient Servers for Cloud and Edge Computing – EnESCE. 

The workshop focused on presenting the most recent work on next generation energy efficient servers, fostering the interaction between the universities, research centers and industry that are working in this area. The objectives of M2DC were also discussed at the panel “Acceleration of machine learning algorithm through heterogeneous architectures: application and architecture perspectives” which was part of the PARMA-DITAM Workshop (Workshop on Parallel Programming and Run-Time Management Techniques for Many-core Architectures / Workshop on Design Tools and Architectures for Multi-Core Embedded Computing Platforms).

After the successful paper presentation and extensive discussions with the community, latest project results were presented at the M2DC booth at the exhibition of the HiPEAC conference. During the whole HiPEAC event, the hardware presentation and live demonstrations continuously attracted a lot of researchers. 2DC showcased the heterogeneous hyperscale server platform RECS together with a new ARMv8 microserver board. Based on the COM Express standard, the highly compact microserver integrates 32 Cortex-A72 cores running at 2.1 GHz, up to 128 GByte SODIMM, multiple 10 Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces as well as multi socket capability. It facilitates a wide range of applications, ranging from cloud computing to HPC.

An FPGA-based hardware accelerator integrated into the RECS server platform was used for live demonstration of a hardware-accelerated data mining application. Utilizing two Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGAs, a speedup of more than 14x was achieved for typical application scenarios, significantly boosting the energy efficiency of the approach compared to state of the art CPU implementations. “The HiPEAC exhibition was a great opportunity to present our approach to the community” said Jens Hagemeyer, hardware workpackage leader of the M2DC project. “During the event more than 200 attendees from academia and industry came to see our booth. We got many interesting requests for cooperation and are currently working on establishing new contacts based on the many positive discussions at HiPEAC.” Various attendees requested access to the M2DC testbeds at Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center and at Bielefeld University to evaluate the heterogeneous server architecture for their applications.