Understanding and Designing New Server Architectures for Emerging Warehouse-Computing Environments
Kevin Lim, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jichuan Chang, Chandrakant D. Patel, Trevor Mudge, Steven K. Reinhardt · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 2008
This 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.