An Evaluation of Server Consolidation Workloads for Multi-Core Designs

While chip multiprocessors with ten or more cores will be feasible within a few years, the search for applications that fully exploit their attributes continues. In the meantime, one sure-fire application for such machines will be to serve as consolidation platforms for sets of workloads that previously occupied multiple discrete systems. Such server consolidation scenarios will simplify system administration and lead to savings in power, cost, and physical infrastructure. This paper studies the behavior of server consolidation workloads, focusing particularly on sharing of caches across a variety of configurations. Noteworthy interactions emerge within a workload, and notably across workloads, when multiple server workloads are scheduled on the same chip. These workloads present an interesting design point and will help designers better evaluate trade-offs as we push forward into the many-core era.