Low-power appliances for big-data analytics using flash storage and hardware accelerators.

We live in an age where enormous amount of data is being collected constantly because of smart phones, ubiquitous presence of sensors and the wide-spread use of social media. Useful and cost-effective analysis of this data is the biggest economic driver for the IT industry. Such analyses are often done in data centers or on cluster of machines because they involve applying sophisticated algorithms to terabyte-size graphs, which are extremely irregular and sparse. We will show how low-power appliances for such analyses can be built using flash storage and hardware accelerators. Such appliances are likely to be 10X cheaper than 16-32 node server clusters and will come in the form factor of an SSD to be plugged into your laptop. This work has been done by Sang-Woo Jun and Andy Wright under my supervision