Active Storage Revisited: The Case for Power and Performance Benefits for Unstructured Data Processing Applications

The proliferation of digital data has resulted in a mushrooming of data-intensive applications, especially in the area of unstructured data processing. Given the growing popularity of unstructured data processing applications (e.g., FlickrTM, Google MapsTM), it is important to rethink system architectures to efficiently run these applications, from both the performance and power viewpoints. In this paper, the authors revisit active storage, which proposed offloading computation to disk drive processors, as a possible system architecture for these applications. Unlike previous work, they evaluate the microarchitectural aspects of active storage and perform an in-depth examination of the design of the offload processors.