The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, 2/e (Paperback)

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.

Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Note to the Reader / Introduction / Workloads and Software Infrastructure / Hardware Building Blocks / Datacenter Basics / Energy and Power Efficiency / Modeling Costs / Dealing with Failures / Closing Remarks / Bibliography / Author Biographies

隨著計算運算持續向雲端移動，感興趣的計算平台不再像披薩盒或冰箱，而是一個倉庫裡擠滿了電腦。這些新的大型數據中心與早期傳統的託管設施非常不同，不能簡單地視為一組共同設置的伺服器。這些設施中的大部分硬體和軟體資源必須協同工作，以有效地提供良好的網際網路服務性能，這只能通過對其設計和部署的整體方法來實現。換句話說，我們必須將數據中心本身視為一個巨大的倉庫級計算機（WSC）。我們描述了WSC的架構，影響其設計、運營和成本結構的主要因素，以及其軟體基礎的特點。我們希望這對於當今WSC的架構師和程式設計師以及未來可能在單個板上實現當今WSC等效的未來多核平台的人們有所幫助。

第二版註解

在倉庫級計算方面的學術和工業發展近四年後，我們很高興為這本講義帶來我們的第一次重大更新。公共雲的普及使得WSC軟體技術對更多的程式設計師具有相關性，因此我們擴展了第2章，以反映我們對WSC軟體系統和WSC程式設計的工具箱的更好理解。在第3章中，我們增加了對微弱伺服器與強大伺服器權衡的演變景觀的涵蓋範圍，並且現在提供了在原版中承諾但缺乏的WSC互連和存儲系統概述。在新合著者Google杰出工程師Jimmy Clidaras的大力幫助下，設施機械和電力分配設計的材料已經更新並大幅擴展（參見第4章和第5章）。第6章和第7章也進行了重大改進。我們希望這個修訂版能繼續滿足這個領域的教育工作者和專業人士的需求。

目錄：致謝 / 讀者註 / 引言 / 工作負載和軟體基礎設施 / 硬體構建模塊 / 數據中心基礎知識 / 能源和功耗效率 / 成本建模 / 處理故障 / 結語 / 參考文獻 / 作者簡介