Michael Sevilla talks on Using Phoenix for a Scale-up vs. Scale-out Comparison

Scale-up often performs better that scale-out for a small enough working set. This make sense, since many of the slow and remote components in a scale-out system (network speeds, disk speeds, etc.) can be replaced with fast and local components in a scale-up system (interprocess communication, shared memory, RAM speeds, etc.). Scale-up also offers other appealing characteristics, including a simple pro- gramming model, dynamic optimization (via the operating system), and the ability to evolve with hardware architectures.

In light of this, it is worth wondering: “Why would any business or organization choose scale-up over scale-out?” It turns out scale-out has many nice properties and a system designer would be privy to scale-out if the workload:

• has parallelism
• needs fault tolerance
• needs portability
• needs more storage
• needs more resources
• can be completed on cheaper machines

But are these properties only offered in a scale-out architecture? We show that we can achieve these properties on a scale-up system without overwhelming overheads, leading to new architectural and structural opportunities in large systems.

msevilla_scale-out-vs-up.pdf 1.54 MB