Understanding query complexity and its implications for energy-efficient web search

Today´s largest datacenters dissipate megawatts of power. Efficiency is rapidly becoming the primary determinant of datacenter capability. To understand microarchitectural factors that affect efficiency, we must study datacenter workloads. Most studies treat the workload as a large, monolithic piece of software. But a workload is often comprised of many, diverse software tasks. For example, a web search engine executes many individual queries. There is a vast difference between the complexity of searching for a single term and that of searching for a collection of related terms interspersed with Boolean and wildcard operators, which are increasingly common in search engines [1, 6].