Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems: Queueing Theory in Action (Hardcover)

Computer systems design is full of conundrums:

•Given a choice between a single machine with speed s, or n machines each with speed s/n, which should we choose?

•If both the arrival rate and service rate double, will the mean response time stay the same?

•Should systems really aim to balance load, or is this a convenient myth?
•If a scheduling policy favors one set of jobs, does it necessarily hurt some other jobs, or are these "conservation laws" being misinterpreted?

•Do greedy, shortest-delay, routing strategies make sense in a server farm, or is what's good for the individual disastrous for the system as a whole?

•How do high job size variability and heavy-tailed workloads affect the choice of a scheduling policy?

•How should one trade off energy and delay in designing a computer system?

•If 12 servers are needed to meet delay guarantees when the arrival rate is 9 jobs/sec, will we need 12,000 servers when the arrival rate is 9,000 jobs/sec?

Tackling the questions that systems designers care about, this book brings queueing theory decisively back to computer science. The book is written with computer scientists and engineers in mind and is full of examples from computer systems, as well as manufacturing and operations research. Fun and readable, the book is highly approachable, even for undergraduates, while still being thoroughly rigorous and also covering a much wider span of topics than many queueing books. Readers benefit from a lively mix of motivation and intuition, with illustrations, examples, and more than 300 exercises - all while acquiring the skills needed to model, analyze, and design large-scale systems with good performance and low cost. The exercises are an important feature, teaching research-level counterintuitive lessons in the design of computer systems. The goal is to train readers not only to customize existing analyses but also to invent their own.

計算機系統設計充滿了難題：
• 在單台速度為s的機器和每台速度為s/n的n台機器之間該選擇哪一種？
• 如果到達率和服務率都加倍，平均響應時間是否保持不變？
• 系統是否真的應該追求負載平衡，還是這只是一個方便的神話？
• 如果一個調度策略偏好某一組工作，是否一定會對其他工作造成損害，或者這些“守恆定律”被誤解了？
• 在服務器農場中，貪婪、最短延遲的路由策略是否合理，或者對個體有益的東西對整個系統來說是災難性的？
• 高工作大小變異性和重尾工作負載如何影響調度策略的選擇？
• 在設計計算機系統時，如何在能源和延遲之間進行權衡？
• 如果在到達率為9個作業/秒時需要12台服務器來滿足延遲保證，那麼在到達率為9,000個作業/秒時，我們是否需要12,000台服務器？

這本書解決了系統設計師關心的問題，將排隊理論重新引入計算機科學。本書針對計算機科學家和工程師撰寫，並包含了計算機系統、製造和運營研究的豐富實例。本書既有趣又易讀，即使對本科生來說也非常容易理解，同時又非常嚴謹，涵蓋的主題範圍比許多排隊書籍更廣泛。讀者可以從動機和直覺的結合中受益，並通過插圖、例子和300多個練習來獲得所需的技能，這些練習有助於建模、分析和設計性能良好且成本低廉的大型系統。這些練習是一個重要的特點，教授關於計算機系統設計的研究級別的反直覺教訓。目標是培養讀者不僅能夠自定義現有分析，還能夠創造自己的分析。