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Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2010 Symposium (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Warehouse-Scale Computing: The Machinery That Runs the Cloud--Luiz André Barroso
Pages 15-20

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.


From page 15...
... WSCs are particularly efficient for popular computing and data-intensive online services, such as Internet searches or language translations. Because a single search request may query the entire Web, including images, videos, news sources, maps, and product information, such services require a computing capacity well beyond the capabilities of a personal computing device.
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From page 16...
... Cooling Infrastructure Virtually all energy provided to computing equipment becomes heat that must be removed from the facility so the equipment can remain within its designed operating temperature range. This is accomplished by air conditioning units inside the building that supply cold air (18 to 22°C)
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From page 17...
... These decisions are ultimately based on workload characteristics. For exam ple, search workloads tend to compute heavily within server nodes and exchange comparatively little networking traffic.
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From page 18...
... Examples of data-processing workloads might include stitching individual satellite images into seamless Google Earth tiles or building a Web index from a large collection of crawled documents. The structure of these workloads tends to be relatively uniform, and the keys for high performance are finding the right way to partition them among multiple tasks and then place those tasks closer to their corresponding data.
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From page 19...
... Programming efficient WSC workloads requires handling complex performance trade-offs and creating reliable systems in the face of high failure rates. WRAP UP The rapid increase in the popularity of Internet services as a model for provisioning computing and storage solutions has given rise to a new class of massive-scale computers outside of the traditional application domain of supercomputing-class systems.
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Key Terms

  • computing equipment
  • data processing
  • wsc hardware
  • wsc workloads
  • internet connectivity

  • scheduling master
  • little networking
  • power usage
  • cooling infrastructure
  • online services

  • brief description
  • total energy
  • processing capabilities
  • individual job
  • seamless google

  • little processing
  • services provider
  • center efficiency
  • internet searches
  • storage master

  • uninterruptible power
  • networking traffic
  • personal computing
  • power supply
  • hardware consists

  • cost sensitivity
  • services result
  • processing workloads
  • scheduling slaves
  • efficient wsc


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