In a nutshell, what is the innovation that you just announced at the ASPLOS conference? Can you explain why it’s important for the average YouTube viewer or creator?
Jeff: Our mission is “To give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Let anyone upload a video to show anyone else in the world, for free. That takes a lot of processing power. Several years ago, as the scale of videos on our platform grew to dramatic levels, we needed to come up with a new system that would let creators continue to upload seamlessly, and viewers watch with all the choices they’ve come to expect.
An important thing to understand is that video is created and uploaded in a single format, but will ultimately be consumed on different devices - from your phone to your TV - at different resolutions. Some viewers will be streaming to a 4K TV at home and others watching on their phone riding the bus. The infrastructure team’s job is to get those videos ready for you to watch in a process called transcoding— the compressing of videos so that we send the smallest amount of data to your chosen device with the highest possible quality video. But it’s costly and slow, and doing that processing using regular computer “brains” (called CPUs) is pretty inefficient, especially as you add more and more videos.
So we created a new system for transcoding video that lets us do this process much more efficiently at our data centers, and at warehouse scale. We decided to leverage an idea that computer scientists have been working on for years - to develop a special “brain” for this specific work. In other fields, there are special brains for graphics (GPUs) or artificial intelligence (TPUs). In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU). We’ve seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.