Chapter 7. CPUs and Domain-Specific Hardware
In Chapter 1, “Introduction to Distributed Platforms,” you saw that a distributed services platform requires distributed services nodes (DSNs) to be present as close as possible to the user applications. The services provided by these DSNs may require substantial processing capabilities, especially when features such as encryption and compression are required.
DSNs can be implemented with domain-specific hardware or general-purpose CPUs. It is essential to have a historical perspective on this topic because the pendulum has swung in both directions a couple of times.1 Back in the 1970s–1980s, at the time of mainframes, the central CPUs were not fast enough to do both computing and I/O. Coprocessors ...
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