Attack of the Killer Microseconds
Authors: Luiz Barroso, Mike Marty, David Patterson, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan Venue: CACM (Magazine) This work shows that while architects have tackled problems and the nanosecond scale, and software has optimized for the millisecond scale, there exists a significant void in microsecond operation optimization. The result is that many operations which take in the order of a few microseconds degenerate into millisecond operations, or at least, reduce efficiency by up to or more than an order of magnitude in many cases. One such example is an RDMA, which by itself is only a ~2us operation. However, after dispatching, kernel-scheduling, interrupt-based notifications, and a TCP/IP stack, the transportation blows up to ~75us. The authors imply that this area is prime for research to optimize warehouse-scale computing. Such areas include reduced lock contention, lower-overhead interrupt handling, improved scheduling, and hardware-offloading in the mi...