Wrapping a bunch of replies into one: Absolutely agree that we need to view fast storage as something other than disk behind a block interface and slow memory, especially with all the different flavours of fast persistent storage that seem to be on the horizon. For the one's that attach to the memory bus, the PMFS-style [1] approach of treating them like a file-system for discoverability and then mmaping to allow them to be accessed as memory is pretty attractive.
I'm not sure a dedicated storage processing unit is the way to go though; I think we could equally well see bits of functionality being offloaded to smarter controllers (kind of like checksum, VLANs, etc are on network adapters) while the CPU remains in charge of orchestrating the different bits.
Also agree on the fact that it is an interesting data structure problem -- a lot of the work we do involves examining what the right data structures are for things once seeks are free and cache locality is the dominant factor for operations.
Wrapping a bunch of replies into one: Absolutely agree that we need to view fast storage as something other than disk behind a block interface and slow memory, especially with all the different flavours of fast persistent storage that seem to be on the horizon. For the one's that attach to the memory bus, the PMFS-style [1] approach of treating them like a file-system for discoverability and then mmaping to allow them to be accessed as memory is pretty attractive.
I'm not sure a dedicated storage processing unit is the way to go though; I think we could equally well see bits of functionality being offloaded to smarter controllers (kind of like checksum, VLANs, etc are on network adapters) while the CPU remains in charge of orchestrating the different bits.
Also agree on the fact that it is an interesting data structure problem -- a lot of the work we do involves examining what the right data structures are for things once seeks are free and cache locality is the dominant factor for operations.
[1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2592814