Active SSD design for energy-efficiency improvement of web-scale data analysis

NAND flash based solid state drives (SSDs) have been widely adopted as storage devices in modern data centers to provide high performance I/O services. Recently, researchers proposed several schemes to improve energy efficiency of the system by off-loading specific computation tasks from generic processors to local processing elements in SSD controllers. However, it is inefficient to directly apply these approaches to the web-scale data analysis system equipped with modern SSDs using FPGA based controllers. More important, the design schemess proposed in prior work cannot work with our target system. In order to overcome the limitation, we present our Active SSD design, considering unique features of computation tasks in web-scale data analysis. In addition, we address an important issue about interference between normal data processing and local computation in Active SSDs. The detailed architecture of our Active SSD is described, and a prototype is implemented. Moreover, the modification to the whole system is also introduced to enable the Active SSD. Experimental results based on real applications show that the energy efficiency can be significantly improved with our design.