Distributed smart disks for I/O-intensive workloads on switched interconnects

Steve C. Chiu*, Wei Keng Liao, Alok N. Choudhary

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Disk-based smart storage represents processor-embedded active I/O devices that are equipped with a dedicated network interface controller and on-disk storage (memory and disk). Today's I/O-intensive workloads require architectures whose performance scales with increasing storage capacity. The advent of switch-based, low-latency and high-bandwidth network protocols, such as Virtual Interface Architecture and InfiniBand, promises to improve both performance and scalability beyond current state-of-the-art I/O interconnect topologies. This paper evaluates a disk-based distributed smart storage architecture composed of fully distributed processor-embedded disks that are interconnected by a high-performance switched network, and investigates the performance of the proposed processing model on different storage interconnects with representative workloads, including TPC-H queries, association rules mining, high-dimensional data clustering, and two-dimensional fast Fourier transform (FFT).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)643-656
Number of pages14
JournalFuture Generation Computer Systems
Volume22
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2006

Funding

Wei-keng Liao is a research assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northwestern University. He received a PhD in computer and information science from Syracuse University in 1999. His research interests are in the areas of high-performance computing, parallel I/O, data mining, and data management for large-scale scientific applications. Dr. Liao has participated in several research projects sponsored by the U.S. DoE.

Keywords

  • Cluster computing
  • InfiniBand
  • Parallel I/O
  • Storage interconnect

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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