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

This paper seeks to understand and design next-generation servers for emerging "Warehouse-computing" environments. The authors make two key contributions. First, they 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, they study a new solution that incorporates volume non-server-class components in novel packaging solutions, with memory sharing and flash-based disk caching. The results show that this approach has promise, with a 2X improvement on average in performance-per-dollar for the benchmark suite.