Rigorous and Practical Server Design Evaluation – tutorial at ASPLOS 2014

The emergence of cloud computing as a dominant computing platform highlights the need for practical and rigorous architectural evaluation of server systems. Such evaluation mandates the use of a variety of real-world server workloads, all of which are radically different from traditional desktop and scientific benchmarks. Unfortunately, deep and complex software stacks of both conventional (e.g., OLTP, DSS) and emerging scale-out (e.g., Media Streaming, Web Search) server workloads make the evaluation process even harder and slower, postponing the adoption of realistic server benchmarks within the architectural community.