General-purpose blade infrastructure for configurable system architectures

Bladed servers are increasingly being adopted in high-density enterprise datacenters by virtue of the improved benefits they offer in form factor density, modularity, and more robust management for control and maintenance with respect to rack-optimized servers. In the future, such servers are likely to form the key foundational blocks for a variety of system architectures in data centers. However, designing a commodity blade system environment that can serve as a general-purpose infrastructure platform for a wide variety of future system architectures poses several challenges. This paper discusses these challenges and presents specific system architecture solutions, along with application examples to illustrate the general-purpose nature of the infrastructure for parallel and distributed applications.