Energy savings through embedded processing on disk system

Many of today's data-intensive applications manipulate disk-resident data sets. As a result, their overall behavior is tightly coupled with their disk performance. Unfortunately, most of these applications quickly become disk bound since disk I/O times, the communication latencies, and energy consumption required to transfer disk data to the host machine can be very large. A promising solution to this problem is to embed computational power into the disk storage system. This paper concentrates on such a smart disk based architecture and proposes an automated approach that partitions a given application code between the host machine and the smart disk. The main goal is to perform data filterings, identified at compile time, on the smart disk, thereby reducing the energy spent in communicating disk data to the host unit for processing. To achieve this, the proposed approach uses integer linear programming to identify the code fragments that perform significant data filtering and assigns such fragments to the smart disk for execution. In addition to the communication energy benefits of the proposed approach, we show in this paper that this approach can also help us better exploit the low-power management capabilities provided by the system. Our experiments with four data-intensive applications indicate significant energy savings.