Learning from Failures #

Resource Sharing vs Isolation #

If workloads are imbalanced, resource isolation may improve performance for some workloads on a system but may degrade performance for others. In addition, the overall performance may be worse than before. Instead, sharing resources can lead to good performance overall, although some workloads may not reach their optimal. It might seem unfair to the workloads which don’t get the optimal performance from the system but it helps the system alleviate the performance penalties of other workloads running on the system. I learned it from a project I undertook during my Ph.D. We did not expect this outcome and the project ultimately failed. However, it left a valuable lesson for me. It feels like the observation could span beyond computer systems, and could be true for economy and society overall.