Design space exploration for efficient computing in Solid State drives with the Storage Processing Unit

Computer architects face two major challenges in building future exa-scale systems: high energy consumption and the increasing gap between processor and storage speeds. Moving the processing closer to the data, inside the persistent storage, will help mitigate these challenges. This will result in a hierarchical compute structure across the system with a major component of the processing hierarchy inside the Solid State Drive. This new architecture is called the Storage Processing Unit. We perform design space exploration and propose several optimizations to the application space and the architectural space. This research significantly improves the energy use and performance of the system. We observe energy savings from 11 – 423X and performance gains from 4 – 66X for applications including k-means, Sparse BLAS, and others.