Active Disks: Programming Model, Algorithms and Evaluation

Several application and technology trends indicate that it might be both pro table and feasible to move computation closer to the data that it processes. In this paper, we evaluate Active Disk architectures which integrate signi cant processing power and memory into a disk drive and allow application-speci c code to be downloaded and executed on the data that is being read from written to disk. The key idea is to o oad bulk of the processing to the diskresident processors and to use the host processor primarily for coordination, scheduling and combination of results from individual disks. To program Active Disks, we propose a stream-based programming model which allows disklets to be executed e ciently and safely. Simulation results for a suite of six algorithms from three application domains commercial data warehouses, image processing and satellite data processing indicate that for these algorithms, Active Disks outperform conventional-disk architectures.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Anurag Acharya, Mustafa Uysal, Joel H. Saltz
• Keywords: Active Disk Architectures, Active Disks, ASPLOS 1998, Programming Languages, Written To Disk