Cayley Data Centers

Cayley Routing

A huge mess (via)

The Chronicle has a new article about the "Cayley Data Centers" that Hakim Weatherspoon's student Ji-Yong Shin has been working on with Gün Sirer and Darko Kirovski (MSR).  These wireless data centers use cylindrical racks connected by 60GHz transceivers to directly route network traffic between nodes.  In their paper, which won best paper at the upcoming ANCS, they discuss how wireless data centers can achieve "higher fault tolerance, improved latency, lower power consumption, and easier maintenance" than data centers with wires running everywhere.

Those nice clean cylinders seem far more comforting than the mess of wires you sometimes get in big data centers!