Gordon: Using Flash Memory to Build Fast, Power-Efficient Clusters for Data-Intensive Applications

As the society becomes more information-driven, the authors have begun to amass data at an astounding and accelerating rate. At the same time, power concerns have made it difficult to bring the necessary processing power to bear on querying, processing, and understanding this data. They describe Gordon, a system architecture for data-centric applications that combines low-power processors, flash memory, and data-centric programming systems to improve performance for data-centric applications while reducing power consumption. The paper presents an exhaustive analysis of the design space of Gordon systems, focusing on the trade-offs between power, energy, and performance that Gordon must make. It analyzes the impact of flash-storage and the Gordon architecture on the performance and power efficiency of data-centric applications.