High-Performance Data-Intensive Computing

2008-08-14 io pub

Maya Gokhale's Storage Intensive Super Computer (SISC) project at LLNL explored a number of new technologies for improving the performance of data-intensive applications. In addition to experimenting with commercial DB appliances (e.g., Netezza, LexisNexis, and XtremeData), we also looked at hardware accelerators (GPUs and FPGAs) and new flash-memory devices from Fusion-io. We wrote a paper describing a variety of experiences for IEEE Computer.

Fun Sidenote: The "ioMemory" device listed here was an early prototype of Fusion-io's ioDimm product. They asked us to change the name a day before publishing so we wouldn't spoil their official product release.

Abstract

Data-intensive problems challenge conventional computing architectures with demanding CPU, memory, and I/O requirements. Experiments with three benchmarks suggest that emerging hardware technologies can significantly boost performance of a wide range of applications by increasing compute cycles and bandwidth and reducing latency.

Publication

IEEE Computer Paper Maya Gokhale, Jonathan Cohen, Andy Yoo, W. Marcus Miller, Arpith Jacob, Craig Ulmer, and Roger Pearce, "Hardware Technologies for High-Performance Data-Intensive Computing", in IEEE Computer vol. 41, Issue 4, April 2008.