SearchWithMobile presentation/discussion summary

[James Chin]

Hey Everyone,

Today, we discussed the paper entitled "Web Search Using Mobile Cores:
Quantifying and Mitigating the Price of Efficiency." The authors pit
the Xeon processor vs. the Atom processor by evaluating Microsoft's
Bing search engine via its Index Serving Nodes (ISNs). They seek to
prove that small, low-power cores (like those of the Atom processor)
can be better suited for web search in terms of performance.
Specifically, they focus on the price of efficiency for such
processors (the tradeoff between performance-per-Watt and quality-of
service, robustness, and flexibility) and how to mitigate that
price. In the end, they propose that the ideal chip is a
hypothetical, multi-core Atom chip, as this solution would accommodate
more servers that are delivering higher aggregate throughput and
result in lower expenditures for power and cooling infrastructures.

However, based on our discussion, it is unclear whether the authors
are sure that the Atom is ultimately superior to the Xeon for building
datacenters. Also, this paper doesn't consider the cost of
maintaining a large number of mobile-class processors, as that could
be more than the cost of maintaining a small number of server-class
processors.

In any case, I hope this presentation/discussion was enriching for you
in some way!

Thanks again,
James