Consolidated server racks are quickly becoming the standard infrastructure for engineering, business, medicine, and science. Such servers are still designed much in the way when they were organized as individual, distributed systems. Given that many fields rely on big-data analytics substantially, its cost-effectiveness and performance should be improved, which can be achieved by flexibly allowing resources to be shared across nodes. Here we describe Venice, a family of data-center server architectures that includes a strong communication substrate as a first-class resource. Venice supports a diverse set of resource-joining mechanisms that enables applications to leverage non-local resources efficiently. We have constructed a hardware prototype to better understand the implications of design decisions about system support for resource sharing. We use it to measure the performance of at-scale applications and to explore performance, power, and resource-sharing transparency tradeoffs (i.e., how many programming changes are needed). We analyze these tradeoffs for sharing memory, accelerators, and NICs. We find that reducing/hiding latency is particularly important, the chosen communication channels should match the sharing access patterns of the applications, and of which we can improve performance by exploiting inter-channel collaboration.

中文翻译：

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威尼斯

整合的服务器机架正迅速成为工程、商业、医学和科学领域的标准基础设施。此类服务器的设计方式仍然与它们被组织为单独的分布式系统时的方式大相径庭。鉴于许多领域对大数据分析的依赖程度很高，其成本效益和性能应该得到提高，这可以通过灵活地允许跨节点共享资源来实现。在这里，我们描述了威尼斯，一个数据中心服务器架构家族，其中包括一个强大的通信基础作为一流的资源。Venice 支持多种资源加入机制，使应用程序能够有效地利用非本地资源。我们已经构建了一个硬件原型，以更好地理解关于系统支持资源共享的设计决策的含义。我们使用它来衡量大规模应用程序的性能，并探索性能、功率和资源共享透明度的权衡（即需要多少编程更改）。我们分析了共享内存、加速器和 NIC 的这些权衡。我们发现减少/隐藏延迟特别重要，选择的通信通道应该与应用程序的共享访问模式相匹配，并且我们可以通过利用通道间协作来提高性能。