摘要

Specialization of datacenter resources brings performance and energy improvements in response to the growing scale and diversity of cloud applications. Yet heterogeneous hardware adds complexity and volatility to latency-sensitive applications. A resource allocation mechanism that leverages architectural principles can overcome both of these obstacles. We integrate research in heterogeneous architectures with recent advances in multi-agent systems. Embedding architectural insight into proxies that bid on behalf of applications, a market effectively allocates hardware to applications with diverse preferences and valuations. Exploring a space of heterogeneous datacenter configurations, which mix server-class Xeon and mobile-class Atom processors, we find an optimal heterogeneous balance that improves both welfare and energy-efficiency. We further design and evaluate twelve design points along the Xeon-to-Atom spectrum, and find that a mix of three processor architectures achieves a 12x reduction in response time violations relative to equal-power homogeneous systems.

  • 出版日期2014-2