Embedded Systems as Datacenters

Abstract

Designing embedded systems the way we did 20 years ago is still alive and well. As expected, with declining costs, embedded systems are appearing in more and more applications. Advances to the state of the art in creating such systems, where memory and processor are precious resources, have continued, and this work is to be applauded. But just as interestingly, embedded systems are taking on not only problems that require loosening the memory and processor constraints but also those problems that push us into the domain of datacenter design. Datacenter design is where system thinking about heterogeneous parallel processing, data archiving, mission-critical connectivity, and energy management are first-order concerns. In this talk I will illustrate the latter case with some recent explorations and give some attention to how datacenter thinking can be effectively ushered into this new domain.