Twenty Five Years of Warehouse-Scale Computing

Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Urs Hölzle

Abstract: When Google was founded in 1998, it was already clear that successful web search would require enormous amounts of computing power and storage, and that no single computer would be able to handle this task. Consequently, its infrastructure design marked a fundamental shift toward an approach now widely embraced as warehouse-scale computing (WSC). Starting as a niche approach optimized for web search, over the past two and a half decades, WSC has evolved dramatically. Today, it’s the mainstream approach underpinning all hyperscale companies and cloud platforms and is poised to be the foundation for the next wave of artificial intelligence/machine learning computing in the cloud. In this article, we chronicle the evolution of WSC, highlighting pivotal milestones, lessons learned, and the vast opportunities that lie ahead.