ONF Connect 2019

The systems community faces an important and exciting challenge. On one hand, Moore’s law is slowing down, stressing traditional assumptions around cheaper and faster systems every year. Concurrently, demand for computing continues to grow at phenomenal rates, with deeper analysis over ever growing volumes of data, new diverse workloads in the cloud, and smarter edge devices. In this talk, we will summarize recent technology and workload trends and discuss the evolution of system architectures for large "warehouse-scale computing" environments with a focus on the role that networking will play in enabling continued exponential increase in computing capability. Specifically, we will discuss how responding to the current opportunities will require more “out-of-the-box” designs ---considering the entire datacenter as a computer, hierarchical architectures exposing inherent latency variations, and co-designing across hardware and software. Taken together, we sketch a path toward a new Moore’s Law: exponentially increasing compute capability at a fixed cost by increasing the efficiency of the distributed applications running across an auto-balancing warehouse-scale computer, co-optimized across the tens of thousands of compute, storage, and network elements.