Active Disks: Programming Model, Algorithms and Evaluation
Anurag Acharya
Mustafa Uysal
Joel Saltz
ASPLOS-VIII.
Abstract:
Several application and technology trends indicate that it might be
both profitable and feasible to move computation closer to the data
that it processes. In this paper, we evaluate Active Disk
architectures which integrate significant processing power and memory
into a disk drive and allow application-specific code to be downloaded
and executed on the data that is being read from (written to) disk.
The key idea is to offload bulk of the processing to the disk-resident
processors and to use the host processor primarily for coordination,
scheduling and combination of results from individual disks. To
program Active Disks, we propose a stream-based programming model
which allows disklets to be executed efficiently and
safely. Simulation results for a suite of six algorithms from three
application domains (commercial data warehouses, image processing and
satellite data processing) indicate that for these algorithms, Active
Disks outperform conventional-disk architectures.
Postscript.