Understanding and Designing New Server Architectures for Emerging Warehouse-Computing Environments

This paper seeks to understand and design nextgeneration servers for emerging “warehousecomputing” 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 nonserver-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-perdollar for our benchmark suite.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Kevin T. Lim, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Jichuan Chang, Chandrakant D. Patel, Trevor N. Mudge, Steven K. Reinhardt
• Keywords: Benchmark Suite, Flash-based Disk Caching, Hardware, ISCA 2008, Volume Nonserver-class Components