Grant: Industrial Research Chairs for Colleges Grants

As new technologies drive the demand for computing power, the energy consumption, space, and cooling requirements of current data centre technologies are major challenges. Ontario's electrical energy infrastructure is nearly taxed to its limits while real estate costs remain high; and massive data centre cooling and emergency-generator systems present inacceptable environmental impact. Underlying a given business-specific software program are many layers of industry-standard software which create a foundation by isolating the business logic from the hardware and providing standard services (collectively, these layers form a software stack). There are emerging platforms which utilize innovative technologies to operate much more efficiently than the current platforms. However, the success of these emerging platforms depends on the ability to deploy existing software solutions with minimal redevelopment effort. The applied research undertaken will focus on this foundational software stack, using open source software as building blocks to make this possible. Open sourceprovides a distinct advantage in this situation: having access to all of the source code makes it possible to track down all of the hardware dependencies, some of which may be hidden in a closed source environment. This will address pressing needs of several sectors of the local economy: - Software sector, by simplifying adapting their products to work on the new platform; - IT sector, by streamlining deployment of the new technology; - Enterprise data sector, by reducing the space, energy, and acquisition costs for new data centre deployments; and - Energy sector, by reducing strain on electricity infrastructure.