Abstract-Application interference is prevalent in datacenters due to contention over shared hardware resources. Unfortunately, understanding interference in live datacenters is more difficult than in controlled environments or on simpler architectures. Most approaches to mitigating interference rely on data that cannot be collected efficiently in a production environment. This work exposes eight specific complexities of live datacenters that constrain measurement of interference. It then introduces new, generic measurement techniques for analyzing interference in the face of these challenges and restrictions. We use the measurement techniques to conduct the first large-scale study of application interference in live production datacenter workloads. Data is measured across 1000 12-core Google servers observed to be running 1102 unique applications. Finally, our work identifies several opportunities to improve performance that use only the available data; these opportunities are applicable to any datacenter.

The global pool of data is growing at 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, with 90% of it produced in the last two years alone [24]. There is no doubt the era of big data has arrived. This paper explores targeted deployment of hardware accelerators to improve the throughput and energy efficiency of largescale data processing. In particular, data partitioning is a critical operation for manipulating large data sets. It is often the limiting factor in database performance and represents a significant fraction of the overall runtime of large data queries.To accelerate partitioning, this paper describes a hardware accelerator for range partitioning, or HARP, and a hardware-software data streaming framework. The streaming framework offers a seamless execution environment for streaming accelerators such as HARP. Together, HARP and the streaming framework provide an order of magnitude improvement in partitioning performance and energy. A detailed analysis of a 32nm physical design shows 7.8 times the throughput of a highly optimized and optimistic software implementation, while consuming just 6.9% of the area and 4.3% of the power of a single Xeon core in the same technology generation.

The global pool of data is growing at 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, with 90% of it produced in the last two years alone [24]. There is no doubt the era of big data has arrived. This paper explores targeted deployment of hardware accelerators to improve the throughput and energy efficiency of largescale data processing. In particular, data partitioning is a critical operation for manipulating large data sets. It is often the limiting factor in database performance and represents a significant fraction of the overall runtime of large data queries.To accelerate partitioning, this paper describes a hardware accelerator for range partitioning, or HARP, and a hardware-software data streaming framework. The streaming framework offers a seamless execution environment for streaming accelerators such as HARP. Together, HARP and the streaming framework provide an order of magnitude improvement in partitioning performance and energy. A detailed analysis of a 32nm physical design shows 7.8 times the throughput of a highly optimized and optimistic software implementation, while consuming just 6.9% of the area and 4.3% of the power of a single Xeon core in the same technology generation.

We present a translation from programs expressed in a functional IR into dataflow networks as an intermediate step within a Haskellto-Hardware compiler. Our networks exploit pipeline parallelism, particularly across multiple tail-recursive calls, via non-strict function evaluation. To handle the long-latency memory operations common to our target applications, we employ a latency-insensitive methodology that ensures arbitrary delays do not change the functionality of the circuit. We present empirical results comparing our networks against their strict counterparts, showing that nonstrictness can mitigate small increases in memory latency and improve overall performance by up to 2×.

Modern demand for energy-efficient computation has spurred research at all levels of the stack, from devices to microarchi-tecture, operating systems, compilers, and languages. Unfortunately , this breadth has resulted in a disjointed space, with technologies at different levels of the system stack rarely compared, let alone coordinated. This work begins to remedy the problem, conducting an experimental survey of the present state of energy management across the stack. Focusing on settings that are exposed to software, we measure the total energy, average power, and execution time of 41 benchmark applications in 220 configurations , across a total of 200,000 program executions. Some of the more important findings of the survey include that effective parallelization and compiler optimizations have the potential to save far more energy than Linux's frequency tuning algorithms; that certain non-complementary energy strategies can undercut each other's savings by half when combined; and that while the power impacts of most strategies remain constant across applications, the runtime impacts vary, resulting in inconsistent energy impacts.