Hardware Building Blocks

Abstract

As mentioned earlier, the architecture of warehouse-scale computers (WSCs) is largely defined by the choice of its building blocks. This process is analogous to choosing logic elements for implementing a microprocessor, or selecting the right set of chipsets and components in architecting a server platform. In this case, the main building blocks are server hardware, networking fabric, and storage hierarchy components. In this chapter, we focus on the server hardware choices, with the objective of building intuition for how such choices are made.