Exploring Data Warehouse Appliances for Mesh Analysis Applications

As scientific computing users migrate to petaflop platforms that promise to generate multi-terabyte datasets, there is a growing need in the community to be able to embed sophisticated data analysis algorithms in the storage systems for the computing platforms. Data Warehouse Appliances (DWAs) are an attractive option for this work, due to their ability to process massive datasets efficiently. While DWAs have been proven effective in data mining and informatics applications, there are relatively few examples of how DWAs can be integrated into the scientific computing workflow. In this paper we present our experiences in adapting two mesh analysis algorithms to function on two different DWAs: a SQL-based Netezza database appliance and a Map/Reduce-based Hadoop cluster. The main contribution of this work is insight into the differences between the two platforms' programming environments. In addition, we present performance measurements for entry-level DWAs to help provide a first-order comparison of the hardware.