SBIR Phase I: SSD In-Situ Processing

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will fundamentally change what a storage device can do, and give storage a third capability that was not addressed by existing storage technology - the ability to actually process the data under the explicit control of the user. For the computation to take place, only the computational request and the resulting data need to transfer over the storage interface, reducing the interface traffic and the required power. The advent of Big Data and the increasing use of Hyperscale Server technology have resulted in the creation of an additional storage tier that is different from traditional enterprise storage. This new tier requires significantly larger capacity with lower cost and lower operating power, and yet must still exhibit enterprise reliability. This combination of characteristics cannot be serviced by existing technologies, and execution with large data sets typical of Big Data results in inefficient solutions. The information being stored represents the large, unstructured data mined by today's companies for key information and trends that help dictate corporate direction, advertising, and monetization. Future applications include real-time distributed video and image processing, genome sequencing and mining of any unstructured Big Data. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project explores the Big Data paradigm shift where processing capability is pushed as close to the data as possible. The in-situ processing technology pushes this concept to the absolute limit, by putting the computational capability directly into the storage itself and eliminating the need to move the data to main memory before processing. The technology innovation begins with a solid foundation of an enterprise SSD tailored for the needs of modern Data Centers. Key technology that will be added to support these capabilities include hardware-assisted quality of service control, low-cost TLC/3D-TLC NAND Flash enablement through the use of advanced ECC, and a proprietary elastic Flash Translation Layer to support extremely large capacity drives. The final element added to this foundation will be the ability to perform computations directly on the data with the addition of specialized in-situ processing aided by hardware accelerators. To make this disruptive solution as non-invasive as possible, a level of system software is needed to make adoption as seamless as possible.