Modern distributed software is written in high-level abstractions, but it executes on physical silicon, memory buses, and flash storage controllers. High-throughput, low-latency architecture requires understanding the hardware constraints beneath our abstractions: cache lines, memory walls, NUMA topologies, and I/O boundaries.
In this module, you will trace the orders-of-magnitude latency gap between CPU registers, L1/L2/L3 caches, main DRAM, PCIe NVMe flash, and network fabrics. You will analyze how 64-byte cache-line spatial locality, hardware stride prefetchers, MESI cache-coherency invalidations, false sharing across multicore threads, and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) cross-socket interconnects directly govern the throughput ceiling of single-node and distributed services. By grounding software data structures in physical hardware topology, you can eliminate invisible memory stalls before scaling horizontally.