Projecting the performance of decision support workloads on systemswith smart storage (SmartSTOR)
Hsu, W.W.; Smith, A.J.; Young, H.C.
Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2000. Proceedings. Seventh International Conference on
Volume , Issue , 2000 Page(s):417 - 425
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ICPADS.2000.857725
Summary:Recent developments in both hardware and software have made it
worthwhile to consider embedding intelligence in storage to handle
general-purpose processing that can be off-loaded from the hosts. In
particular, low-cost processing power is now widely available and
software can be made robust, secure and mobile. In this paper, we
propose a general smart storage (SmartSTOR) architecture in which a
processing unit that is coupled to one or more disks can be used to
perform such off-loaded processing. A major part of the paper is devoted
to understanding the performance potential of the SmartSTOR architecture
for decision support workloads. Our analysis suggests that there is a
definite performance advantage in using fewer but more powerful
processors, a result that bolsters the case for sharing a powerful
processor among multiple disks. As for software architecture, we find
that the off-loading of database operations that involve only a single
relation is not very promising. In order to achieve significant
speed-up, we have to consider the off-loading of multiple-relation
operations. In general, if embedding intelligence in storage is an
inevitable architectural trend, we have to focus on developing parallel
software systems that can effectively take advantage of the large number
of processing units that will be in the system
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