The class of datacenters known as “warehouse scale computers” (WSCs) house
large-scale data-intensive web services, such as web search, maps, social networking,
docs, video sharing, etc. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon spend
tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to construct and operate WSCs to provide these
services. Maximizing the efficiency of this class of computing devices reduces cost
and has energy implications for a greener planet. However, WSC design and architecture
remains in its relative infancy. WSCs are built using commodity processor architectures
(Intel/AMD), and software components (Linux, GCC, JVM, etc) that have been engineered
and optimized for traditional computing environments and workloads, such as 
those you would find in the desktop/laptop/HPC environment. There are many
characteristics, assumptions, and requirements present in the WSC computing
domain that impact design decisions within these components. In this
presentation, we rethink how WSCs are designed and architected, identify
sources of inefficiency, and develop solutions to improve WSCs, with a
particular focus on the interaction between the application layer, system-software
stack, and the underlying hardware platform.