Review Warehouse-Scale Computing: Entering the Teenage Decade & The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines

The video and the book provided some very unique insights from the people who actually use WSC for  real business and the real problems they encounter or see in this area, here is some interesting points:

- Power PUE is overrated since it only measures the efficiency of the building/cooling infrastructures, which as it reaches the upper 1.1 range, the space of improvement diminishes, and perhaps it’s time to re-focus on computer utilization rate and power consumption.

- SSD can be the future, since it is a very nice alternative that bridges the huge performance gap (storage capacity and random access time) between conventional disks and DRAM, which might help tremendously in improving IO throughput. As more and more applications are having bottlenecks in IO instead of CPUs.

- Networking has had a lot progress in the last decade which makes connecting small number of servers with extremely high bandwidth connections very affordable. Even though connecting all the nodes with extremely high bandwidth connections is still very very expensive, perhaps connecting the nodes on the same rack will bring a lot improvements, and future research can be done in how to leverage the extremely fast connectivity between small local clusters in a large WSC.

- Resource disaggregation is the future, since the range of resources used by various applications are getting wider and wider, maybe it is a good idea to disaggregate the computing, storage or networking resources from the physical machines and have abstractions that allow developers to assume each node is either 128 cores or 1024GB of memory.

- Tradeoff of between price-premium of throughput and utilization of servers is still a challenge and it seems the current industry standard is the low-end server machines.