Breaking the Boundaries in Heterogeneous-ISA Datacenters
Antonio Barbalace, Robert Lyerly, Christopher Jelesnianski, Anthony Carno, Ho-Ren Chuang, Vincent Legout, Binoy Ravindran · 2017
Energy efficiency is one of the most important design considerations in running modern datacenters. Datacenter operating systems rely on software techniques such as execution migration to achieve energy efficiency across pools of machines. Execution migration is possible in datacenters today because they consist mainly of homogeneous-ISA machines. However, recent market trends indicate that alternate ISAs such as ARM and PowerPC are pushing into the datacenter, meaning current execution migration techniques are no longer applicable. How can execution migration be applied in future heterogeneous-ISA datacenters?