Active Storage for Large-Scale Data Mining and Multimedia

The increasing performance and decreasing cost of processors and memory are causing system intelligence to move into peripherals from the CPU. Storage system designers are using this trend toward "excess" compute power to perform more complex processing and optimizations inside storage devices. To date, such optimizations have been at relatively low levels of the storage protocol. At the same time, trends in storage density, mechanics, and electronics are eliminating the bottleneck in moving data off the media and putting pressure on interconnects and host processors to move data more efficiently. We propose a system called Active Disks that takes advantage of processing power on individual disk drives to run application-level code. Moving portions of an application's processing to execute directly at disk drives can dramatically reduce data traffic and take advantage of the storage parallelism already present in large systems today. We discuss several types of applicat...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Erik Riedel, Garth A. Gibson, Christos Faloutsos
• Keywords: Active Disk, Database, Disk Drives, Individual Disk Drives, VLDB 1998