Clearing the clouds: a study of emerging scale-out workloads on modern hardware

Emerging scale-out workloads require extensive amounts of computational resources. However, data centers using modern server hardware face physical constraints in space and power, limiting further expansion and calling for improvements in the computational density per server and in the per-operation energy. Continuing to improve the computational resources of the cloud while staying within physical constraints mandates optimizing server efficiency to ensure that server hardware closely matches the needs of scale-out workloads. In this work, we introduce CloudSuite, a benchmark suite of emerging scale-out workloads. We use performance counters on modern servers to study scale-out workloads, finding that today’s predominant processor micro-architecture is inefficient for running these workloads. We find that inefficiency comes from the mismatch between the workload needs and modern processors, particularly in the organization of instruction and data memory systems and the processor co...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Michael Ferdman, Almutaz Adileh, Yusuf Onur Koçberber, Stavros Volos, Mohammad Alisafaee, Djordje Jevdjic, Cansu Kaynak, Adrian Daniel Popescu, Anastasia Ailamaki, Babak Falsafi
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2012, Data Memory Systems, Physical Constraints, Programming Languages, Server Efficiency