GreenLight Blackbox

Purpose

The GreenLight BlackBox project is geared towards creating a virtual environment of Sun's Data Center so scientists will be able to walk into a 360-degree virtual reality version of it in Calit2’s StarCAVE. Users will be able to zoom into the racks of clusters as well as see and hear the power and heat, from whole clusters of computers down to the smallest instrumented components, such as computer processing and graphics processing chips.

Populating Sun's Data Center

The process of populating the eight racks in Sun's Data Center begins with a text. The text file contains the information regarding hardware components in the data center along with their size, location and slot position in a particular rack. From this information, 3D models are created using 3DS and then imported into the virtual world that contains the data center. Matrix transformations such as translations and rotations are performed on the 3D hardware models so that they are inserted in their appropriate rack in the data center.

Interactive Functionality

The user is able to interact with the virtual representation of Sun's Data Center and view the hardware components within each of its racks. Selecting a rack will cause it to emerge out, along with its hardware components, into a visible position. That particular rack will contain the hardware components that are actually in the physical data center.