Distributed supervision of an edge micro datacenter

This paper presents novel hierarchical management architecture of heterogeneous edge data center. The management architecture was implemented in BRAINE (Big data pRocessing and Artificial Intelligence at the Network Edge) project. One of the key objectives of this project was to develop an energy efficient heterogeneous 3U Edge Micro Data Center (EMDC) including all PCBs, thermal subsystem and mechanics. The BRAINE’s Edge framework is designed to be flexible and support many types of data processing and storage cards. Because of this flexibility and the wide range of heterogeneous cards a sophisticated and hierarchical board/card management functionality is needed. The hierarchical system management consists of a central board management node (BMC: Board Management Controller), and a distributed low-level board management hardware present on all the nodes or cards (BMMC: Board Management MicroController). The goal of this paper is to describe the functionalities and present implementation details of this multi-fold low level interconnection and the services being provided.