Using the active storage fabrics model to address petascale storage challenges

Abstract

We present the Active Storage Fabrics (ASF) model for storage embedded parallel processing as a way to address petascale data intensive challenges. ASF is aimed at emerging scalable system-on-a-chip, storage class memory architectures, but may be realized in prototype form on current parallel systems. ASF can be used to transparently accelerate host workloads by close integration at the middleware data/storage boundary or directly by data intensive applications. We provide an overview of the major components involved in accelerating a parallel file system and a relational database management system, describe some early results, and outline our current research directions. © 2009 ACM.