Design and Evaluation of Smart Disk Architecture for DSS Commercial
Workloads
Gokhan Memik, Mahmut T. Kandemir, Alok Choudhary
Abstract
The requirements for storage space and computational power of
large-scale applications are increasing rapidly. Clusters seem to be the
most attractive architecture for such applications, due to their low
costs and high scalability. On the other hand,
smart disk systems, with their large storage capacities and growing
computational power are becoming increasingly popular. In this work,
we compare the performance of these architectures with a
single host-based system using representative queries from the
Decision Support System (DSS) databases. We show how to implement
individual database operations in the smart disk system and also show
how to optimize the execution of the whole query by bundling
frequently occurring operations together and executing the
bundle in a single invocation. Besides decreasing the overall
execution time, operation bundling also offers an easy-to-program and
easy-to-use interface to access the data on smart disks. We also
present a protocol for minimizing the communication time in the smart
disk based system.
To measure the response times, we have developed the DBsim, an
accurate simulator which can simulate the database operations for the
single host-based, cluster-based and smart disk based systems. Using
this simulator, we illustrate that the smart disk architecture offers
substantial benefits in terms of overall query execution times of the
TPC-D benchmark suite. In particular, the average response time of the
smart disk architecture for the representative queries from the TPC-D
benchmark in our base configuration is 71% smaller than the
response time on the single host-based system and 4.2% smaller than
the response time on the fastest cluster architecture. We also
demonstrate the effectiveness of the operation bundling, and compare
the scalabilities of the cluster-based and smart disk based systems.