Active disk meets flash: A case for intelligent SSDs

Sangyeun Cho, Chanik Park, Hyunok Oh, Sungchan Kim, Youngmin Yi, Gregory R. Ganger

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

90 Scopus citations

Abstract

Intelligent solid-state drives (iSSDs) allow execution of limited application functions (e.g., data filtering or aggregation)on their internal hardware resources, exploiting SSD characteristics and trends to provide large and growing performance and energy efficiency benefits. Most notably, internal flash media bandwidth can be significantly (2-4x or more) higher than the external bandwidth with which the SSD is connected to a host system, and the higher internal bandwidth can be exploited within an iSSD. Also, SSD bandwidth is projected to increase rapidly over time, creating a substantial energy cost for streaming of data to an external CPU for processing, which can be avoided via iSSD processing. This paper makes a case for iSSDs by detailing these trends, quantifying the potential benefifits across a range of application activities, describing how SSD architectures could be extended cost-effectively, and demonstrating the concept with measurements of a prototype iSSD running simple data scan functions. Our analyses indicate that, with less than a 2% increase in hardware cost over a traditional SSD, an iSSD can provide 2-4x performance increases and 5-27x energy efficiency gains for a range of data-intensive computations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICS 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Conference on Supercomputing
Pages91-102
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event27th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, ICS 2013 - Eugene, OR, United States
Duration: 10 Jun 201314 Jun 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing

Conference

Conference27th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, ICS 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityEugene, OR
Period10/06/1314/06/13

Keywords

  • data-intensive computing
  • energy-efficient computing
  • storage systems

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