Fundamentals of Quantitative Design and Analysis - Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - page 62

Chapter 6 is also new to this edition. We introduce clusters and then go into depth on
warehouse-scale computers (WSCs), which computer architects help design. The designers of
WSCs are the professional descendents of the pioneers of supercomputers such as Seymour
Cray in that they are designing extreme computers. They contain tens of thousands of servers,
and the equipment and building that holds them cost nearly $200 M. The concerns of price-
performance and energy efficiency of the earlier chapters applies to WSCs, as does the quant-
itative approach to making decisions.
This topic comes with an abundance of material online (see Preface for more details), both to
reduce cost and to introduce readers to a variety of advanced topics. Figure 1.21 shows them
all. Appendices A , B , and C , which appear in the topic, will be review for many readers.
FIGURE 1.21 List of appendices .
In Appendix D, we move away from a processor-centric view and discuss issues in storage
systems. We apply a similar quantitative approach, but one based on observations of system
behavior and using an end-to-end approach to performance analysis. It addresses the import-
ant issue of how to efficiently store and retrieve data using primarily lower-cost magnetic stor-
age technologies. Our focus is on examining the performance of disk storage systems for typic-
al I/O-intensive workloads, like the OLTP benchmarks we saw in this chapter. We extensively
explore advanced topics in RAID-based systems, which use redundant disks to achieve both
high performance and high availability. Finally, the chapter introduces queuing theory, which
gives a basis for trading of utilization and latency.
Appendix E applies an embedded computing perspective to the ideas of each of the chapters
and early appendices.
Appendix F explores the topic of system interconnect broadly, including wide area and sys-
tem area networks that allow computers to communicate.
Appendix H reviews VLIW hardware and software, which, in contrast, are less popular than
when EPIC appeared on the scene just before the last edition.