The impact of mega-scale data centers on internet architecture

Abstract

Growing expertise with clusters of commodity PCs have enabled a number of companies to harness petaflops of computation power and petabytes of storage in a cost-efficient manner. Clusters consisting of tens of thousands of PCs are not unheard of in the largest companies and thousand-node clusters are increasingly common in universities, research labs, and companies. Important applications classes include scientific computing, financial analysis, data analysis and warehousing, and large-scale network services. In response to these trends, the data center infrastructure has retooled to extract maximum efficiency from available computation and storage, with particular emphasis on power, cooling, and density.