IEEE Computer Architecture Letters

IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL) is a bi-annual forum for fast publication of new, high-quality ideas in the form of short, critically refereed, technical papers. Submissions are welcomed on any topic in computer architecture.
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From the July-December 2012 Issue

Heterogeneity in “Homogeneous” Warehouse-Scale Computers: A Performance Opportunity

By Jason Mars, Lingjia Tang, and Robert Hundt

Featured article thumbnail imageThe class of modern datacenters recently coined as “warehouse scale computers” (WSCs) has traditionally been embraced as homogeneous computing platforms. However, due to frequent machine replacements and upgrades, modern WSCs are in fact composed of diverse commodity microarchitectures and machine configurations. Yet, current WSCs are designed with an assumption of homogeneity, leaving a potentially significant performance opportunity unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the key factors impacting the available heterogeneity in modern WSCs, and the benefit of exploiting this heterogeneity to maximize overall performance.

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