Using an Object-Based Active Storage Framework to Improve Parallel Storage Systems

Modern processors have improved rapidly over recent decades and disk storage has failed to keep pace with this development rate. Object-based storage was proposed as an alternative interface in order to close the gap between the processing units and the storage components. Object-based storage simplifies data representation and increases the intelligence of storage components by offloading data management tasks from the host file system to the storage. However, we believe that object-based storage features have not been fully explored. In this work, we first introduce an active storage framework we developed for an object-based storage platform. Specifically, we show how to enable active storage by exploiting the object-based storage features. Then, we discuss how the active storage framework can be used in order to improve the scalability, reliability and usability of parallel storage systems.