Warehouse-scale Computers

The computing systems that are powering many of today's large-scale Internet services look less like refrigerators and more like warehouses. Designing efficient warehouse-scale computers requires many of the traditional tools and methods developed by computer architects, and some new tricks as well. In this talk I'll describe some of the defining characteristics of these systems, with a focus on failure handling and power management.

Luiz André Barroso is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he has worked across several engineering areas, ranging from applications and software infrastructure to hardware design. Prior to working at Google, he was a member of the Research Staff at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation, where his group did some of the pioneering work on computer architectures for commercial workloads. That work included the design of Piranha, a system based on an aggressive chip-multiprocessing, which helped inspire many of the multi-core CPUs that are now in the mainstream.

Luiz has a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Southern California and B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Rio de Janeiro.