Coordinating the Design and Management of Heterogeneous Datacenter Resources

Abstract

Heterogeneous design presents an opportunity to improve energy efficiency but raises a challenge in management. Whereas prior work separates the two, we coordinate heterogeneous design and management. We present a market-based resource allocation mechanism that navigates the performance and power trade-offs of heterogeneous architectures. Given this management framework, we explore a design space of heterogeneous processors and show a 12x reduction in response time violations when equipping a datacenter with three processor types over a homogeneous system that consumes the same power. To better understand trade-offs in large heterogeneous design spaces, we explore dozens of design strategies and present a risk taxonomy that classifies the reasons why a deployed system may underperform relative to design targets. We propose design strategies that explicitly mitigate risk, such as a strategy that minimizes the coefficient of variation in performance. In our experiments, we find that risk-aware design accounts for more than 70% of the strategies that produce systems with the best service quality. We also present a new datacenter management mechanism that fairly allocates processors to latency-sensitive applications. Tasks express value for performance using sophisticated piecewise-linear utility functions. With fairness in market allocations, we show how datacenters can mitigate envy amongst latency-sensitive users. We quantify the price of fairness and detail efficiency-fairness trade-offs. Finally, we extend the market to fairly allocate heterogeneous processors.