Skip to main content
Department of Information Technology

Improving the efficiency of multicores in data centers

Speaker

Jason Mars, University of Michigan

Date and Time

Tuesday, September 24th, 2013 at 10:15.

Location

Polacksbacken, room 1213

Abstract

The class of datacenters coined as "warehouse scale computers" (WSCs) house large-scale data intensive web services such as websearch, maps, social networking, docs, video sharing, etc. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon spend ten to hundreds of millions to construct and operate WSCs to provide these services. Maximizing the efficiency of this class of computing reduces cost and has energy implications for a greener planet. However, WSC design and architecture remains in its relative infancy.

WSCs are built using commodity processor architectures (Intel/AMD), and software components (Linux, GCC, JVM, etc) that has been engineered and optimized for traditional computing environments and workloads, such as those you´d find in the desktop / laptop environment. However, there are many characteristics, assumptions, and requirements present in the WSC computing domain that impacts design decisions within these components. In this presentation, we rethink how WSCs are designed and architected, identify sources of inefficiency, and develop solutions to improve WSCs, with a particular focus on the interaction between the application layer, system software stack, and the underlying multicore platform.

About the speaker

Bio: Jason Mars is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. of Computer Science at the University of Virginia in 2012. He has been an active researcher in the areas of computer architecture, system software, and cross-layer system design within the emerging domain of cloud computing platforms. Jason has published dozens of papers in these areas and received a number of rewards and honors for excellence in his research work.

Updated  2013-09-23 10:57:51 by Frédéric Haziza.