Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems
Computer systems design is full of conundrums:
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Given a choice between a single machine with speed s,orn machines each with
speed s/n, which should we choose?
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If both the arrival rate and service rate double, will the mean response time stay the
same?
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Should systems really aim to balance load, or is this a convenient myth?
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If a scheduling policy favors one set of jobs, does it necessarily hurt some other jobs,
or are these “conservation laws” being misinterpreted?
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Do greedy, shortest-delay, routing strategies make sense in a server farm, or is what
is good for the individual disastrous for the system as a whole?
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How do high job size variability and heavy-tailed workloads affect the choice of a
scheduling policy?
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How should one trade off energy and delay in designing a computer system?
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If 12 servers are needed to meet delay guarantees when the arrival rate is 9 jobs/sec,
will we need 12,000 servers when the arrival rate is 9,000 jobs/sec?
Tackling the questions that systems designers care about, this book brings queueing theory
decisively back to computer science. The book is written with computer scientists and
engineers in mind and is full of examples from computer systems, as well as manufacturing
and operations research. Fun and readable, the book is highly approachable, even for
undergraduates, while still being thoroughly rigorous and also covering a much wider span
of topics than many queueing books.
Readers benefit from a lively mix of motivation and intuition, with illustrations, examples,
and more than 300 exercises – all while acquiring the skills needed to model, analyze,
and design large-scale systems with good performance and low cost. The exercises are an
important feature, teaching research-level counterintuitive lessons in the design of computer
systems. The goal is to train readers not only to customize existing analyses but also to
invent their own.
Mor Harchol-Balter is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at
Carnegie Mellon University. She is a leader in the ACM Sigmetrics Conference on Measure-
ment and Modeling of Computer Systems, having served as technical program committee
chair in 2007 and conference chair in 2013.
