🚀 go-pugleaf

Weekly LCS Seminar
Wednesday, October 6, 1999
Hamerschlag Hall, D-Level Conference Room (HH D210)
Noon to 1 pm
Contact:  Karen (87293) karen@ece.cmu.edu

Speaker:  Erik Riedel

Title: Active Disks - Remote Execution for Network-Attached Storage

Abstract:

Today's commodity disk drives are actually small computers, with a
processor, some memory, a network connection, and some spinning
magnetic material that actually stores the data.  Large collections of
data are becoming larger, and people are beginning to analyze (rather
than simply store-and-forget) these masses of data.  Advances in
input/output performance have lagged the rapid development of
commodity processor and memory technology.  We propose a system called
Active Disks that takes advantage of processing power on individual
disk drives to run application-level code.  Moving portions of an
application's processing to execute directly at disk drives can
dramatically reduce data traffic and take advantage of the storage
parallelism already present in large data systems.  It provides a
point of leverage to overcome the I/O bottleneck.

This work focusses on a set of compelling applications that benefit
from Active Disks in the areas of data mining, multimedia, and large
databases.  I will discuss the trends that have made such devices
(almost) a reality, present a model for speedup of Active Disk
applications and discuss results from a prototype system that
implements mining and database functions and shows dramatic speedups
over a system with traditional, "dumb" disks.

References

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~riedel
http://www.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/Active

Bio:

Erik Riedel is a Doctoral Student in Computer Engineering working with
David Nagle and Garth Gibson in the Parallel Data Lab (PDL) and
Christos Faloutsos in the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery
(CALD).  His thesis work is on Active Disks as an extension of
Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD).  He has spent time looking at
I/O in a number areas, including file systems, parallel applications,
scientific systems, and Windows NT.  He also holds a Master's degree
and Bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon.

After his defense next week, Erik will be heading to sunny California
to start work with the Storage Systems Program at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories.

Erik was born in Wurzburg, Germany and - even after 20 years in the
United States - is still occasionally puzzled by some strange American
customs like peanut butter.