2024/02/20 by Mohammad Ewais, Ewais, Mohammad, Paul Chow +1
Computer Science · #Advanced Data Storage Technologies #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.12742
openalex publication_date 2024/02/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Datacenters of today have maintained the same architecture for decades using the server as the primary building block. However, this traditional approach suffers from under-utilization of its resources, often caused by over-allocating these resources when deploying applications to accommodate worst-case scenarios. Specifically, servers can quickly drain their over-allocated memory resources while their CPUs are not fully utilized. This problem gives rise to a different school of thought, where resources are disaggregated instead of tightly bound to servers. This can address the utilization problem by allowing each type of resource to be allocated, utilized and freed separately as required. New high performance communication protocols, like CXL, could pave the way for practical implementations of resource disaggregation. In this article, we argue it is time to reconsider the datacenter architecture as a whole. We present our vision for a disaggregated datacenter aided by well-established computer architecture design methodologies.