High-Performance Storage Systems and Techniques
Summary
Contemporary data‐intensive applications, ranging from scientific computing to real‐time analytics and edge computing, demand storage infrastructures that deliver exceptional throughput, low latency and scalable capacity. To meet these requirements, modern systems integrate multiple storage media—such as DRAM, NVMe solid‐state drives (SSDs) and high‐capacity hard disk drives (HDDs)—into coherent multi‐tiered architectures. Techniques such as intelligent caching, data placement and automated tiering optimise the flow of “hot” and “cold” data, ensuring that frequently accessed information resides on the lowest‐latency media. Advances in flash translation layers and novel interfaces like zoned namespaces offer finer control over physical media, reducing write amplification and extending device endurance. Computational storage, which embeds processing units within storage devices, further mitigates data movement by executing queries and transformations in place. Together, these innovations underpin next‐generation data centres, high‐performance computing clusters and distributed cloud services, delivering higher I/O rates, reduced energy consumption and enhanced resilience against failures.
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High-Performance Storage Systems and Techniques publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in high-performance storage systems and techniques across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Data temperature: A metric that categorises data based on access patterns and custom metadata, guiding its placement across storage tiers.
Multi‐tiered storage: An architecture combining different media types—such as DRAM, SSD and HDD—to balance cost, capacity and performance.
Flash Translation Layer (FTL): A software abstraction that maps logical block requests to physical flash memory locations, handling wear‐levelling and garbage collection.
Computational storage device (CSD): A storage module with integrated processing capabilities, enabling data processing tasks to execute directly within the storage hardware.
References
- Data Temperature Informed Streaming for Optimising Large-Scale Multi-Tiered Storage. Big Data Mining and Analytics (2024).
- FlashPage: A read cache for low-latency SSDs in web proxy servers. Engineering Science and Technology an International Journal (2024).
- Computational storage: an efficient and scalable platform for big data and HPC applications. Journal of Big Data (2019).
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