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The Datacenter as a Computer

An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, Second Edition

  • Book
  • © 2013

Overview

Authors:
  1. Luiz André Barroso

    1. Google, Inc., USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  2. Jimmy Clidaras

    1. Google, Inc., USA

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    You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

  3. Urs Hölzle

    1. Google, Inc., USA

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Part of the book series: Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture (SLCA)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
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  2. Introduction

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 1-13

  3. Workloads and Software Infrastructure

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 15-32

  4. Hardware Building Blocks

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 33-45

  5. Datacenter Basics

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 47-65

  6. Energy and Power Efficiency

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 67-89

  7. Modeling Costs

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 91-99

  8. Dealing with Failures and Repairs

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 101-114

  9. Closing Remarks

    • Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle
    Pages 115-121

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 123-138
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About this book

As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today’s WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today’s WSCs on a single board.

Notes for the Second Edition

After nearly four years of substantial academic and industrial developments in warehouse-scale computing, we are delighted to present our first major update to this lecture. The increased popularity of public clouds has made WSC software techniques relevant to a larger pool of programmers since our first edition. Therefore, we expanded Chapter 2 to reflect our better understanding of WSC software systems and the toolbox of software techniques for WSC programming. In Chapter 3, we added to our coverage of the evolving landscape of wimpy vs. brawny server trade-offs, and we now present an overview of WSC interconnects and storage systems that was promised but lacking in the original edition. Thanks largely to the help of our new co-author, Google Distinguished Engineer Jimmy Clidaras, the material on facility mechanical and power distribution design has been updated and greatly extended(see Chapters 4 and 5). Chapters 6 and 7 have also been revamped significantly. We hope this revised edition continues to meet the needs of educators and professionals in this area.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Google, Inc., USA

    Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle

About the authors

Luiz Andre Barroso has worked across several engineering areas including web search, software infrastructure, storage availability, energy efficiency, and hardware design. He was the first manager of Googles Platforms Engineering team, the group responsible for designing the companys computing platform, and currently leads engineering infrastructure for Google Maps. Prior to Google, he was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation (later acquired by Compaq), where his group did some of the pioneering work on processor and memory system design for multi-core CPUs. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California and B.S/M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the PUC, Rio de Janeiro. Luiz is a Google Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Urs Holzle served as Googles first vice president of engineering and has been leading the development of Googles technical infrastructure since 1999. His current responsibilities include the design and operation of the servers, networks, datacenters, and software infrastructure that power Googles internal and external cloud platforms. He is also renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Googles original top dog). Urs grew up in Switzerland and received a masters degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and, as a Fulbright scholar, a Ph.D. from Stanford. While at Stanford (and then a start-up later acquired by Sun Microsystems), he invented fundamental techniques used in most of todays leading Java compilers. Before joining Google, he was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Fellow of the ACM and AAAS, a member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and serves on the board of the US World Wildlife Fund.

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