RAMCloud and the Low-Latency Datacenter | SNIA

Abstract

Datacenter computing has driven many of the innovations in computer systems over the last decade. The first phase of datacenter computing focused on scale (harnessing thousands of machines for a single application), but the next phase will focus on latency (taking advantage of the close proximity between machines). In this talk I will discuss why low latency matters in datacenters and how it will be achieved over the next 5-10 years. I will also introduce RAMCloud, a storage system that keeps all data in DRAM at all times in order to provide 100-1000x faster access than existing storage systems. Low-latency datacenters, combined with infrastructure such as RAMCloud, will enable a new class of applications that manipulate large datasets more intensively than has ever been possible.