ONS 2015: Wednesday Keynote - Amin Vahdat

The numbers in this are daunting, but I personally believe massively multi-core systems make the problem a lot less daunting than the article makes out. Core counts in big servers can get up over 100 per server for Intel (see Amazon's new EC2 offerings for public evidence of this). Intel's Xeon Phi series of processors offer core counts approaching ~300. Going to 300x takes the required latencies per request from microseconds up to the millisecond range. POWER systems can go even higher. Moreover, for many workloads that actually leverage this sort of compute you can do something horrifying with the new DRAM-addressable persistent storage: DMA directly from the NIC into block storage. Some (many?) high performance network adapters offer the ability to filter packets to distinct Rx queues; buffers can be posted with addresses in the storage mapped region allowing direct NIC->storage transfer. If you bake more intelligence into the NIC, you can even do things like Mellanox's NVMe Fabrics: [link] This is particularly relevant to the JBOD example. Now, there's the question of what you're actually going to do with all of that data, but in a lot of cases it's likely a durable read-mostly cache that's effectively a materialized view optimized of some (hopefully much slower write-rate) transactional store (say, product data on Amazon -- detail pages served up at some absurdly high rate, but a relatively low mutation rate). Other workloads I can think of fall into a category I tend to