Memory Hierarchy for Web Search

Online data-intensive services, such as search, serve billions of users, utilize millions of cores, and comprise a significant and growing portion of datacenter-scale workloads. However, the complexity of these workloads and their proprietary nature has precluded detailed architectural evaluations and optimizations of processor design trade-offs. We present the first detailed study of the memory hierarchy for the largest commercial search engine today. We use a combination of measurements from longitudinal studies across tens of thousands of deployed servers, systematic microarchitectural evaluation on individual platforms, validated trace-driven simulation, and performance modeling – all driven by production workloads servicing real-world user requests. Our data quantifies significant differences between production search and benchmarks commonly used in the architecture community. We identify the memory hierarchy as an important opportunity for performance optimization, and present new insights pertaining to how search stresses the cache hierarchy, both for instructions and data. We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is significant reuse of data that is not captured by current cache hierarchies, and discuss why this precludes state-of-the-art tiled and scale-out architectures. Based on these insights, we rethink a new cache hierarchy optimized for search that trades off the inefficient use of L3 cache transistors for higher-performance cores, and adds a latency-optimized on-package eDRAM L4 cache. Compared to state-of-the-art processors, our proposed design performs 27% to 38% better.