Heterogeneity in “Homogeneous” Warehouse-Scale Computers: A Performance Opportunity
Venue
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL), vol. Vol. 10 No. 2 (2011), pp. 29-32
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Jason Mars, Lingjia Tang, Robert Hundt
BibTeX
Abstract
The class of modern datacenters recently coined as “warehouse scale computers”
(WSCs) has traditionally been embraced as homogeneous computing platforms. However,
due to frequent machine replacements and upgrades, modern WSCs are in fact composed
of diverse commodity microarchitectures and machine configurations. Yet, current
WSCs are designed with an assumption of homogeneity, leaving a potentially
significant performance opportunity unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the
key factors impacting the available heterogeneity in modern WSCs, and the benefit
of exploiting this heterogeneity to maximize overall performance. We also introduce
a new metric, opportunity factor, which can be used to quantify an application’s
sensitivity to the heterogeneity in a given WSC. For applications that are
sensitive to heterogeneity, we observe a performance improvement of up to 70% when
employing our approach. In a WSC composed of state-of-the-art machines, we can
improve the overall performance of the entire datacenter by 16% over the status
quo.
