Research

Scaling data centers to handle task-parallel workloads requires balancing the cost of hardware, operations, and power. Low-power, low-core-count servers reduce costs in one of these dimensions, but may require additional nodes to provide the required quality of service or increase costs by underutilizing memory and other resources.

We show that the throughput, response time, and power consumption of a high-core-count processor operating at a low clock rate and very low power consumption can perform well when compared to a platform using faster but fewer commodity cores.

Specific measurements are made for a key-value store, Memcached, using a variety of systems based on three different processors: the 4-core Intel Xeon L5520, 8-core AMD Opteron 6128 HE, and 64-core Tilera TILEPro64.