Threading opportunities in high-performance flash-memory storage

The storage-intensive supercomputing (SISC) project [1] at LLNL is a research effort that is currently investigating hardware architectures for improving the performance of large, data-intensive applications. In order to achieve next-generation performance goals for these applications, it is necessary to consider system architectures that employ both computational accelerators (e.g., FPGAs or GPUs) and high-speed, mass-storage devices. In this work we focus on the latter by examining the performance characteristics of emerging flash-memory storage devices in the context of multicore environments. High-Performance Flash-Memory Storage Consumer demand for portable music devices with mass storage has driven down the price of flash memory to a point where flash-memory-based storage devices are nearl