[Beowulf] Ethernet connected drives

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

What these will be good at (and what the Active Disk research espouses) is applying very simple filters (e.g., simple greps) to avoid pushing data across buses needlessly.  Basically, only the data you want to come out that you will then compute with will be returned.  The compute- and ram-intensive tasks will still be reserved for the real machine.

Decent paper on one approach to this using SSDs (since they already have compute and memory on-board to deal with all their firmware complexities).

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/Storage/CMU-PDL-11-115.pdf



-- I can even see a sort of commodity lightweight database/web services kind of box. These pretty much already exist (e.g. all those 1 -2 TB Network attached storage boxes with a built in media server, etc.) but more highly integrated. Pretty soon, you have one cable: PoE on the network cable.