7

1.1.4

Organization of the Thesis

The rest of this thesis is organized as follows. In Chapter 2, we summarize the

features of cluster based Web servers, cluster based data centers and user level com 

munication mechanisms. The coscheduled Web server is addressed in Chapter 3, and

Chapter 4 discusses three application server models and our proposed backend forwarding

scheme. In Chapter 5, our NIC caching scheme is introduced, along with our analysis of

the workload characterization of the three traces (CSE, UCB, PSU). Concluding remarks

and future research directions are drawn in the last chapter.