Web search using mobile cores: quantifying and mitigating the price of efficiency

  • Authors:

  • Vijay Janapa Reddi;Benjamin C. Lee;Trishul Chilimbi;Kushagra Vaid

  • Affiliations:

  • Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA;Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The commoditization of hardware, data center economies of scale, and Internet-scale workload growth all demand greater power efficiency to sustain scalability. Traditional enterprise workloads, which are typically memory and I/O bound, have been well served by chip multiprocessors com- prising of small, power-efficient cores. Recent advances in mobile computing have led to modern small cores capable of delivering even better power efficiency. While these cores can deliver performance-per-Watt efficiency for data center workloads, small cores impact application quality-of-service robustness, and flexibility, as these workloads increasingly invoke computationally intensive kernels. These challenges constitute the price of efficiency. We quantify efficiency for an industry-strength online web search engine in production at both the microarchitecture- and system-level, evaluating search on server and mobile-class architectures using Xeon and Atom processors.