Our Mission: Parallel disks
consisting of multiple disks with high-speed switched interconnect are ideal
for data-intensive applications running in high-performance computing
systems. Improving the energy efficiency of parallel disks is an intrinsic
requirement of next generation high-performance computing systems, because a
storage subsystem can represent 27% of the energy consumed in a data center. However,
it is a major challenge to conserve energy for parallel disks and energy
efficiently coordinate I/Os of hundreds or thousands
of concurrent disk devices to meet high-performance and energy-saving
requirements. The goal of this research is to develop energy conservation
techniques that will provide significant energy savings while achieving
low-cost and high-performance for parallel disks.
Our Approach: In this
project we will take an organized approach to implementing energy-saving
techniques for parallel disks, simulating energy-efficient parallel disk
systems, and conducting a physical demonstration. The proposed project will
undertake the following four tasks: (1) design and develop a novel buffer-disk (BUD) architecture to reduce energy dissipation in
parallel disk systems; (2) develop innovative
energy-saving techniques, including an energy-related reliability model,
energy-aware data partitioning, disk request processing, data movement, data
placement, prefetching strategies, and power
management for buffer disks; (3) implement a simulation
toolkit (BUDSIM) used to develop a variety of energy-saving techniques and
their integration in the BUD architecture; and (4) validate the BUD
architecture along with our innovative
energy-conservation techniques using real data-intensive applications
running on high-performance clusters.
Our Funding: BUD is being funded
through the Computing Processes & Artifacts (CPA) Award CCF-0742187
(CISE-CCF) from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
