Web Search Using Mobile Cores: Quantifying and Mitigating the Price of Efficiency

Citation:

V. J. Reddi, B. Lee, T. Chilimbi, and K. Vaid, “Web Search Using Mobile Cores: Quantifying and Mitigating the Price of Efficiency,” in International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 2010.
Paper1.12 MB

Abstract:

The commoditization of hardware, data center economies of scale, and Internet-scale workload growth all demand greater power efficiency to sustain scalability. Traditional enterprise workloads, which are typically memory and I/O bound, have been well served by chip multiprocessors comprising of small, power-efficient cores. Recent advances in mobile computing have led to modern small cores capable of delivering even better power efficiency. While these cores can deliver performance-per-Watt efficiency for data center workloads, small cores impact application quality-of-service robustness, and flexibility, as these workloads increasingly invoke computationally intensive kernels. These challenges constitute the price of efficiency. We quantify efficiency for an industry-strength online web search engine in production at both the microarchitecture- and system-level, evaluating search on server and mobile-class architectures using Xeon and Atom processors.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

C.0 [Computer Systems Organization]: General—System architectures; C.4 [Computer Systems Organization]: Performance of Systems—Design studies, Reliability, availability, and serviceability

General Terms

Measurement, Experimentation, Performance

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 05/31/2019