Server Architecture from Enterprise to Post-Moore

Luiz Barroso started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation, investigating workload-optimized multiprocessor server architectures marketed to enterprises in the 1990s. These high-margin, low-volume products lost their market to more cost-effective enterprise servers built from high-volume desktop CPUs riding Moore's law. The enterprise market has slowly transitioned to the cloud, where desktop PCs have formed the backbone of computing in data centers since the early 2000s to minimize cost and maximize the return on investment. Moving forward, with the absence of Moore's law, future servers require a clean-slate, cross-stack design to scale in compute, communication, and storage capacity while reducing operational, capital, and environmental costs.