M2DC – Modular Microserver DataCentre with heterogeneous hardware

The Modular Microserver DataCentre (M2DC) project investigates, develops and demonstrates a modular, highly-efficient, cost-optimized server architecture composed of heterogeneous microserver computing resources. The resulting server architecture will be able to be tailored to meet requirements from a wide range of application domains. M2DC is built on three main pillars: a flexible server architecture that can be easily customised, maintained and updated; advanced management strategies and system efficiency enhancements (SEE); well-defined interfaces to the surrounding software data centre ecosystem. In this paper, we focus in particular on the thermal management strategies and on the initial benchmarking of the Aarch64 ARM architecture.