Towards Energy Efficient Data Management in HPC: The Open Ethernet Drive Approach

An Open Ethernet Drive (OED) is a new technology that encloses into a hard drive (HDD or SSD) a low-power processor, a fixed-size memory and an Ethernet card. In this study, we thoroughly evaluate the performance of such device and the energy requirements to operate it. The results show that first it is a viable solution to offload data-intensive computations on the OED while maintaining a reasonable performance, and second, the energy consumption savings from utilizing such technology are significant as it only consumes 10% of the power needed by a normal server node. We propose that by using OED devices as storage servers in HPC, we can run a reliable, scalable, cost and energy efficient storage solution.