Warehouse Scaled Computers By: Keith Grubbs Instructor: A. V. Gerbessiotis CS345-001 New Jersey Institute of Technology Fall 2016

Traditional Data Centers Is a large group of networked computer servers used by organizations for data processing and storage, and requires large power units and cooling systems. Traditional Data Centers Handle many small to medium size applications within an organization or several organizations in a warehouse type facility. Warehouse Scaled Computers, or WSCs Handle a few very large scale applications for a specific organization in a warehouse type facility.

Warehouse Scaled Computer Image: Courtesy of Bing Today’s WSCs consist of clusters of low end servers instead of a few high end servers for cost-efficiency.

Diagram of Cluster Configuration Image: Courtesy of The Data Center as a Computer Typical elements in warehouse-scale systems: 1U server (left), 7´ rack with Ethernet switch (middle), and diagram of a small cluster with a cluster-level Ethernet switch/router (right).

Cost Efficiency Hardware Analysis Image: Courtesy of The Data Center as a Computer

HP Integrity Performance Advantage Image: Courtesy of The Data Center as a Computer. Performance advantage of a cluster built with high-end server nodes (128-core SMP) over a cluster with the same number of processor cores built with low-end server nodes (four-core SMP), for clusters of varying size. (HP Integrity ~$12M, HP ProLiant $75K, .6%)

WSC software is categorized in three levels: Platform Level Software firmware, kernel, operating system distribution, and libraries expected in all machines to abstract from the hardware Cluster Level Infrastructure the collection of distributed systems software that manages resources at the cluster level (Data Center OS) Application Level Software further divided into online services (Gmail, Google search) and offline services (data analysis), and designed to take advantage of the parallelism inherent in Internet services

Offline Data Analysis Graph Image: Courtesy of The Data Center as a Computer Example of daily traffic fluctuation for a search service in one datacenter; x-axis is a 24-h period and the y-axis is traffic measured in queries per second.

Conclusion: Computation is moving into the cloud, and thus into WSCs. Software and hardware architects must be aware of the end-to-end systems to design good solutions. We are no longer designing individual “pizza boxes,” or single-server applications, and we can no longer ignore the physical and economic mechanisms at play in a warehouse full of computers (Barroso and Holzle, 2009).

Source: Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle: “The Datacenter as a Computer” An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines chapters (1, 2, 3, 8) , Web. 2009, pp. L13 CS345-001 class website, section C. http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00193ED1V01Y200905CAC006