This experimental course will discuss the principles and hardware and software technologies that will underlie the next generation of Warehouse-Scale Computers (WSCs). The basic building block is a ~1 MegaWatt WSC containing up to 10,000 compute nodes and up to an Exabyte (2^60 Bytes) of non-volatile memory connected via a low-latency, high-bandwidth optical switch. The technologies to be discussed include custom datacenter systems on a chip (SoCs), distributed simulation tools for warehouse-scale machines, and systems software for modern disaggregated datacenter architectures. The first third of the semester will consist of formal readings and presentations (sometimes with outside speakers) on the key underlying technologies and components of datacenter design. The remainder of the course will consist of group directed research projects developed by the students and the instructors.

Course Calendar with Handouts
Subject to Change.

Date Presenter Activity Assignments/Content
Tue Aug 29 Krste Meeting 1: Course Intro and FireBox retrospective PDF
Tue Sep 5 All Meeting 2: Discuss Readings on WCS Programming Occupy the Cloud: Distributed Computing for the 99%
Serverless Computation with OpenLambda
Tue Sep 12 All Meeting 3: DRAMs for WSCs An Effective DRAM Cache Architecture for Scale-Out Servers
A Fully Associative Tagless DRAM Cache
Tue Sep 19 All Meeting 4: Datacenter workloads Reconciling High Server Utilization and Sub-millisecond Quality-of-Service
Profiling a warehouse-scale computer
Tue Sep 26 Meeting 5: Warehouse-Scale Interconnect Network Requirements for Resource Disaggregation
Building Manycore Processor-to-DRAM Networks with Monolithic CMOS Silicon Photonics
Tue Oct 3 Meeting 6: Project Proposal Discussions Project Proposals Due
Tue Oct 10 Meeting 7:
Tue Oct 17 Meeting 8:
Tue Oct 24 Meeting 9:
Tue Oct 31 Meeting 10:
Tue Nov 7 Meeting 11: Project checkpoints 5-minute, 5-slide presentation per student
Tue Nov 14 Meeting 12:
Tue Nov 21 No class, work on paper submissions
Tue Nov 28 Meeting 13:
Tue Dec 5 No class, work on projects
Tue Dec 12 All Final Project Presentations Final Project Presentations, Room 606 Soda, Time 2pm-6pm
Fri Dec 15 Final Project Paper due at 11:59 PM (email PDF to both instructors)