Paper: Understanding and Designing New Server Architectures for Emerging Warehouse-Computing Environments
Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 2:02AM Authors:
Kevin Lim
Parthasarathy Ranganathan
Jichuan Chang
Chandrakant Patel
Trevor Mudge
Steven Reinhardt
This International Symposium on Computer Architecture paper seeks to understand and design next-generation servers for emerging "warehouse-computing" environments. We make two key contributions. First, we put together a detailed evaluation infrastructure including a new benchmark suite for warehouse-computing workloads, and detailed performance, cost, and power models, to quantitatively characterize bottlenecks. Second, we study a new solution that incorporates volume non-server-class components in novel packaging solutions, with memory sharing and flash-based disk caching. Our results show that this approach has promise, with a 2X improvement on average in performance-per-dollar for our benchmark suite.
Reader Comments (1)
A new paper by Google on the subject of Warehouse Scale Computing:
http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006">The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture, 108 pages
Luiz André Barroso, Google Inc.
Urs Hölzle, Google Inc.
Abstract
As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today's WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today's WSCs on a single board.
Table of Contents: Introduction / Workloads and Software Infrastructure / Hardware Building Blocks / Datacenter Basics / Energy and Power Efficiency / Modeling Costs / Dealing with Failures and Repairs / Closing Remarks