The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines, Third Edition (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture)

This book describes warehouse-scale computers (WSCs), the computing platforms that power cloud computing and all the great web services we use every day. It discusses how these new systems treat the datacenter itself as one massive computer designed at warehouse scale, with hardware and software working in concert to deliver good levels of internet service performance. The book details the architecture of WSCs and covers the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. Each chapter contains multiple real-world examples, including detailed case studies and previously unpublished details of the infrastructure used to power Google's online services. Targeted at the architects and programmers of today's WSCs, this book provides a great foundation for those looking to innovate in this fascinating and important area, but the material will also be broadly interesting to those who just want to understand the infrastructure powering the internet.

The third edition reflects four years of advancements since the previous edition and nearly doubles the number of pictures and figures. New topics range from additional workloads like video streaming, machine learning, and public cloud to specialized silicon accelerators, storage and network building blocks, and a revised discussion of data center power and cooling, and uptime. Further discussions of emerging trends and opportunities ensure that this revised edition will remain an essential resource for educators and professionals working on the next generation of WSCs.

Luiz Andre Barroso has worked across several engineering areas including web search, software infrastructure, storage availability, energy efficiency, and hardware design. He was the first manager of Google's Platforms Engineering team, the group responsible for designing the company's computing platform, and currently leads engineering infrastructure for Google Maps. Prior to Google, he was a member of the research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation (later acquired by Compaq), where his group did some of the pioneering work on processor and memory system design for multi-core CPUs. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Southern California and B.S/M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the PUC, Rio de Janeiro. Luiz is a Google Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Urs Holzle served as Google's first vice president of engineering and has been leading the development of Google's technical infrastructure since 1999. His current responsibilities include the design and operation of the servers, networks, datacenters, and software infrastructure that power Google's internal and external cloud platforms. He is also renowned for both his red socks and his free-range Leonberger, Yoshka (Google's original top dog). Urs grew up in Switzerland and received a master's degree in computer science from ETH Zurich and, as a Fulbright scholar, a Ph.D. from Stanford. While at Stanford (and then a start-up later acquired by Sun Microsystems), he invented fundamental techniques used in most of today's leading Java compilers. Before joining Google, he was a professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Fellow of the ACM and AAAS, a member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and serves on the board of the US World Wildlife Fund.