Design and Evaluation of Distributed Smart Disk Architecture for I/O-Intensive Workloads

Abstract. Smart disks, a type of processor-embedded active I/O devices, with their on-disk memory and network interface controller, can be viewed as processing elements with attached storage. The growing size and access patterns of today’s large I/O-intensive applications require architectures whose processing power scales with the storage capacity. We evaluate a distributed smart disk architecture with representative I/O-intensive workloads including TPC-H queries, association rule mining, data clustering, and 2-D fast Fourier transform applications to study the proposed architecture.