1. Warehouse Scaled Computers
By: Keith Grubbs
Instructor: A. V. Gerbessiotis CS
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Fall 2016

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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).

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

6. 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%)

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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).

10. 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 CS class website, section C.