Systems Research Challenges: A Scale-Out Perspective

Overview

The dominant programming model for such systems consists of message passing at the systems level and multithreading at the element level. Today, exploiting scale-out at all levels in systems is becoming imperative in order to overcome a fundamental discontinuity in the development of microprocessor technology caused by power dissipation. The pervasive use of greater levels of scale-out, on the other hand, creates its own challenges in architecture, programming, systems management, and reliability. This paper identifies some of the important research problems that must be addressed in order to deal with the technology disruption and fully realize the opportunity offered by scale-out.