Industry Expert Blogs

One of the big themes from the Linley Data Center Conference earlier this month was the need to get more performance out of each server without increasing the power requirements. Adding more processing power in the form of more cores per server, or more servers, increases the power. So even if it does make incremental improvements in performance, it is at the price of increased power. In addition, many algorithms run out of steam once they have "enough" cores/servers. Very large data centers have almost unlimited numbers of servers and so it is hard to make any particular algorithm run faster just by adding more servers, even ignoring power budget issues. Google search is not going to run faster by adding another thousand processors (which Google does pretty much every day, by the way).