by D. Cohen,
F. Petrini,
M. D. Day,
M. Ben-Yehuda,
S. W. Hunter,
and U. Cummings
As computing system workloads become more distributed in
nature, there is an increasing dependence on the networking
interconnects between such systems. As stated by Amdahl’s Other
Law, this dependence not only exists on the I/O (input/output)
subsystem, but also on the memory subsystems. In particular, as
processor utilization increases, there is a direct, corresponding
increase in memory and I/O utilization. At a broader level, the
distribution of workloads is driving the need for computing based
on locality (or pods) to achieve the appropriate balance of
compute, network, and storage resources. This paper studies the
applicability of Amdahl’s Other Law to the data center to better
understand the relationship between processor systems and the
networks interconnecting them. This study is also relevant as
multicore systems will become more prevalent to sustain growth of
processing performance.
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