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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 hostbased 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 easyto-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 hostbased, cluster-based, and smart-disk-based systems. Using this simulator, we illustrate that the smart disk architecture offers substantial benefits in term