(2023/2024) Computing Infrastructures

These notes are an unofficial resource and shouldn’t replace the course material or any other book on computing infrastructure. It is not made for commercial purposes. I’ve made the following notes to help me improve my knowledge and maybe it can be helpful for everyone.

As I have highlighted, a student should choose the teacher’s material or a book on the topic. These notes can only be a helpful material.

The notes are taken from the books required for the course:

• L.A. Barroso, U. Hölzle, and P. Ranganathan. The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines, Third Edition. Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture. Springer International Publishing, 2022.
• E.D. Lazowska. Quantitative System Performance: Computer System Analysis Using Queueing Network Models. Prentice-Hall, 1984.
• Course slides.

You can view/download the PDF here. In the notes folder, you can also see the source code.

In the CHANGELOG file you can see the changes made to each version of the PDF file. The versioning can be helpful if you want to understand if there are any new features/fixes in the file.

For any issue, use the appropriate section.

Course Syllabus

According to the official course syllabus:

• Hardware infrastructure of datacenters:
  • Basic components, Rack structure, Cooling
  • Hard Disk Drive and Solid State Disks
  • RAID architectures
  • Hardware Accelerators
• Software infrastructure of datacenters:
  • Virtualization: basic concepts, technologies, hypervisors and containers
  • Computing Architecture: Cloud, Edge and Fog Computing
• Infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service
• Methods:
  • Scalability and performance of datacenters: definitions, fundamental laws, queuing network theory basics
  • Reliability and availability of datacenters: definitions, fundamental laws, reliability block diagrams
• Exercises to apply the knowledge in simple examples or to more complicated scenarios will be used especially considering the parts related to reliability, storage system design, and performance analysis.