On Performance: From Hardware up to Distributed Systems

Nothing is easyDistributed system nowadays: frequency of processors increased thousand times; system performanceSystem performance as a whole sometimes tripled. Complexity of the system became uncontrollable with zillions of processes and elements to juggle increased unconsciously, leaving for us some comfort but at an astronomical cost. What it means? We are doing something seriously wrong and doing it consistently and persistently. Thus, authors of this work have decided to put together our own discussions and estimations we did since 2002 up to now. We show that system performanceSystem performance depends on user, hardware and software, structure or architectureComparative architecture analysis of a system and its topology. We propose to see performance analysis a bit wider, thinking systematically what various zones of computer or distributed systemDistributed system can bring or contribute, including the role of processor, structure of system softwareSystem software and over-valued parallelization (try to eat and dance at the same time—it might be fun). We have introduced a kind of virtual architecture through which see instruction execution considering what is in there for us and what system requires for itself. The observation is rather pessimistic. We have briefly demonstrated what simplest architecture if carefully designed can give regarding performance, reliabilityReliability and energy efficiency AT THE SAME TIME!